Reactor neutrino applications and coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering

Abstract

Potential applications of neutrino detection to nuclear security have been discussed since the 1970s. Recent years have seen great progress in detector technologies based on inverse beta decay, with the demonstration of ton-scale surface-level detectors capable of high quality neutrino spectrum measurements. At the same time coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering has been experimentally confirmed in 2017 with neutrinos from stopped pion decay and there is a number of experiments aimed at seeing this reaction with reactor neutrinos. The large cross section and threshold-less nature of this reaction make it plausible to consider it for applications to nuclear security and here, we present a first direct comparison of the two reaction modes.1 In this letter we deal exclusively with electron antineutrinos and for brevity will refer to them simply as neutrinos.

The physics potential of a reactor neutrino experiment with Skipper CCDs: Measuring the weak mixing angle

“…As already pointed out in Ref. [75], if the background grows at low energies, the experimental sensitivity is significantly decreased. This is because in that case, the background has a shape very similar to the signal, see Fig.…”

“…Therefore, we will assume a baseline background of 1 kdru, with flat deposited energy spectrum. We will study the impact of higher or lower background rates, as well as the impact of the background spectral shape [75]. Moreover, we will consider the reactor-on background to be negligible, although this needs to be determined by detailed simulations and mandatorily avoided by adding shielding between the detector and the reactor core.…”

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

“…First, the cross section is much larger. This observation holds true even after normalizing per unit of detector mass [204] provided the thresholds are low enough (sub 100 eV). Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that certain neutrino flux components appear only below the IBD threshold, E ν 1.8 MeV, and so CEνNS is the only tool available for certain applications.…”

“…In both cases, CEνNS occupies a unique and complementary position relative to IBD because of its thresholdless nature [202,204]. There are two ways in which CEνNS differentiates itself from IBD.…”