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

We analyze in detail the physics potential of an experiment like the one recently proposed by the vIOLETA collaboration: a kilogram-scale Skipper CCD detector deployed 12 meters away from a commercial nuclear reactor core. This experiment would be able to detect coherent elastic neutrino nucleus sca...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fernandez-Moroni, Guillermo, Machado, Pedro A.N., Martinez-Soler, Ivan, Perez-Gonzalez, Yuber F., Rodrigues, Dario, Rosauro Alcaraz, Salvador
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/704870
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/704870
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2021)186
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Antineutrinos
Neutrino Oscillations
Reactor
Física
Descripción
Sumario:We analyze in detail the physics potential of an experiment like the one recently proposed by the vIOLETA collaboration: a kilogram-scale Skipper CCD detector deployed 12 meters away from a commercial nuclear reactor core. This experiment would be able to detect coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering from reactor neutrinos, capitalizing on the exceptionally low ionization energy threshold of Skipper CCDs. To estimate the physics reach, we elect the measurement of the weak mixing angle as a case study. We choose a realistic benchmark experimental setup and perform variations on this benchmark to understand the role of quenching factor and its systematic uncertainties, background rate and spectral shape, total exposure, and reactor antineutrino flux uncertainty. We take full advantage of the reactor flux measurement of the Daya Bay collaboration to perform a data driven analysis which is, up to a certain extent, independent of the theoretical un- certainties on the reactor antineutrino flux. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, this experimental setup may provide a competitive measurement of the weak mixing angle at few MeV scale with neutrino-nucleus scattering