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. 40Ar and 28Si) 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 non- trivial 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.

First-generation new physics in simplified models: from low-energy parity violation to the LHC

“…Radiative corrections to the SM values have been studied in refs. [87,134,135]. Following the conventions from ref.…”

“…The main difference between refs. [87,135] concerns the treatment of the non-perturbative uncertainties arising in γ-Z mixing diagrams involving light quark loops, but this only affects Q ν ,p w and thus Q ν w at well below the percent level. In either case, due to process-dependent corrections being absorbed into the definition, there is no direct correspondence to the weak charges as defined in electron scattering, in such a way that the model-independent comparison of NP constraints has to proceed in terms of the respective Wilson coefficients.…”

LEvEL: Low-Energy Neutrino Experiment at the LHC

“…Recently, one of the most recent exciting developments in the field of neutrino physics was the first observation of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) [43] by the COHERENT collaboration [6,7], in which neutrinos produced at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) scatter coherently off the cesium iodide [6] or argon [7] nuclei in the COHERENT detectors. CEvNS offers a new way to observe neutrino interactions and, through precision measurements, will allow for better understanding of neutrinos in the standard model [44][45][46][47] and beyond . While this cross section relatively is large, these scattering events are difficult to observe.…”

Neutrino non-standard interactions meet precision measurements of Neff

“…[24,94] for loop bounds on dimension-6 electronneutrino contact operators, refs. [38,[95][96][97][98][99][100][101] for neutrino coherent scattering experiments, and ref. [102] for FASERν.…”