Over the past two decades, I led the development of a comprehensive approach for the accurate theoretical description of neutrino-nucleus interactions—needed to reduce the systematic uncertainty of accelerator-based searches of neutrino oscillations—derived from an approach previously employed to study electron-nucleus scattering. The first important result of this effort has been the generalisation of the factorization scheme and the spectral function formalism to the description of neutrino-nucleus cross sections in the kinematical region in which the impulse approximation is expected to be applicable [Phys. Rev. D 72 (2005) 053005; Nucl. Phys. A 789 (2007) 379]. These studies contributed to expose the inadequacy of the relativistic Fermi gas model of nuclear dynamics, which is still routinely used in simulation codes.

Based on the analysis of the double differential neutrino-carbon cross section in the charged-current quasi elastic sector, measured by the MiniBooNE Collaboration, in 2010 I have first argued that the failure of most existing theoretical models to simultaneously explain electron- and neutrino-nucleus data should be ascribed to the uncertainties associated with the flux average procedure, hindering the identification of the dominant reaction mechanism in neutrino interactions [PRL 105 (2010) 132301; AIP Conf. Proc. 1405 (2011) 27 and 351]. Further work in this direction resulted in the extension of the factorization scheme to the treatment of inelastic channels [PRL 118 (2017) 142502] as well as to processes involving two-nucleon mesen-exchange currents [PRC 99 (2019) 025502].

In 2014, Camillo Mariani and I proposed a measurement of the proton knockout cross section from Argon and Titanium, to be performed at Jefferson Lab. The data obtained from this experiment [PRC 98 (2018) 014607, 99 (2019) 054608, 100 (2019) 054606, 103 (2021) 034604; PRD 105 (2022) 112002. 107 (2023) 012005] allowed the determination of the energy and momentum distributions of protons and neutrons in the argon ground state, which are currently being implemented in the NuWro neutrino event generator.

The factorization scheme ad the spectral function formalism has been also employed to obtain accurate estimates of the rate of gamma-ray emitted in the aftermath of neutral current neutrino- and antineutrino-oxygen scattering processes [PRL 108 (2012) 052505]. The extension of this analysis to the case of neutrino- and antineutrino-carbon interactions—based on an accurate phenomenological model of the carbon spectral function [PRC 110 (2024) 054612]—is under way.