Flavor-dependent radiative corrections in coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering

Abstract

We calculate coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering cross sections on spin-0 nuclei (e.g. 40 Ar and 28 Si) at energies below 100 MeV within the Standard Model and account for all effects of permille size. We provide a complete error budget including uncertainties at nuclear, nucleon, hadronic and quark levels separately as well as perturbative error. Our calculation starts from the four-fermion effective field theory to explicitly separate heavy-particle mediated corrections (which are absorbed by Wilson coefficients) from light-particle contributions. Electrons and muons running in loops introduce a nontrivial dependence on the momentum transfer due to their relatively light masses. These same loops, and those mediated by tau leptons, break the flavor universality because of mass-dependent electromagnetic radiative corrections. Nuclear physics uncertainties significantly cancel in flavor asymmetries resulting in subpercent relative errors. We find that for low neutrino energies, the cross section can be predicted with a relative precision that is competitive with neutrino-electron scattering. We highlight potentially useful applications of such a precise cross section prediction ranging from precision tests of the Standard Model, to searches for new physics and to the monitoring of nuclear reactors.

New Physics searches in a low threshold scintillating argon bubble chamber measuring coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering in reactors

“…The theoretical prediction of the Huber+Mueller model [26,27], with a 2.4% uncertainty, is considered. The uncertainties in the form factors are negligible with respect to the uncertainty in the anti-neutrino spectra [28].…”

Neutrino electromagnetic interactions in elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering

“…L ( ) 2 [1], where , , and 2 are, respectively, the neutrino magnetic moment (in units of ), millicharge (in units of ) and charge radius. For illustrative purposes we present numerical calculations for elastic neutrino scattering on the 40 Ar nucleus with parametrization of the nuclear form factors that can be found in [7] and references…”

Physics reach of a low threshold scintillating argon bubble chamber in coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering reactor experiments

“…Setup B(1.5) considers this uncertainty. It is worth mentioning that at reactor energies, the uncertainties in the form factors are negligible compared to the uncertainty in the antineutrino spectrum [38].…”