  We have developed a model for neutrino-induced coherent pion production off
nuclei in the energy regime of interest for present and forthcoming neutrino
oscillation experiments. It is based on a microscopic model for pion production
off the nucleon that, besides the dominant Delta pole contribution, takes into
account the effect of background terms required by chiral symmetry. Moreover,
the model uses a reduced nucleon-to-Delta resonance axial coupling, which leads
to coherent pion production cross sections around a factor two smaller than
most of the previous theoretical estimates. In the coherent production, the
main nuclear effects, namely medium corrections on the Delta propagator and the
final pion distortion, are included. We have improved on previous similar
models by taking into account the nucleon motion and employing a more
sophisticated optical potential. As found in previous calculations the
modification of the Delta self-energy inside the nuclear medium strongly
reduces the cross section, while the final pion distortion mainly shifts the
peak position to lower pion energies. The angular distribution profiles are not
much affected by nuclear effects. Nucleon motion increases the cross section by
15% at neutrino energies of 650 MeV, while Coulomb effects on charged pions are
estimated to be small. Finally, we discuss at length the deficiencies of the
Rein-Sehgal pion coherent production model for neutrino energies below 2 GeV,
and in particular for the MiniBooNE and T2K experiments. We also predict flux
averaged cross sections for these two latter experiments and K2K.
