Particle and Astroparticle Physics Seminar

COHERENT Neutrino Scattering at the SNS

Matt Green

North Carolina State University

Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) is a neutral-current process in which a neutrino interacts coherently with an entire nucleus. While the coherence of the process leads to a large cross section enhancement with increasing neutron number, the low momentum transfer results in difficult-to-detect low energy nuclear recoils. The COHERENT Collaboration has combined state-of-the-art low-threshold detector technology with the intense flux of neutrinos generated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) to detect CEvNS for the first time, and is developing it as a tool for searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, including Non-Standard Neutrino Interactions (NSIs), oscillations into sterile neutrinos, nuclear form factors, and neutrino magnetic moments. This talk will detail the first-ever observation of CEvNS, as reported in our recent publication in Science, and the COHERENT Collaboration's follow-up efforts to fully characterize the interaction with Liquid Argon, High-Purity Germanium, and Sodium-Iodide -based detectors.