Observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering

By D. Akimov, J. Albert, Peibo An, C. Awe, P. Barbeau, B. Becker, V. Belov, A. Brown, A. Bolozdynya, B. Cabrera-Palmer and 71 more. Science, 2017

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A 14.6-kilogram sodium-doped CsI scintillator is used to detect a neutrino scattering process with a 6.7σ confidence level. Nailing down an elusive process Detecting neutrinos—elementary particles that barely interact with other matter—usually requires detectors of enormous size. A particular interaction of neutrinos with atomic nuclei, called the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS), is predicted to occur with relatively high probability, and it could be used to drastically reduce the size of neutrino detectors. However, observing this interaction requires a source of low-energy neutrinos and detectors that contain nuclei of optimal mass. Akimov et al. observed CEνNS with a 6.7σ confidence by using a comparatively tiny, 14.6-kg sodium-doped CsI scintillator exposed to neutrinos from a spallation neutron facility (see the Perspective by Link). The discovery places tighter bounds on exotic, beyond-the-standard-model interactions involving neutrinos. Science, this issue p. 1123; see also p. 1098 The coherent elastic scattering of neutrinos off nuclei has eluded detection for four decades, even though its predicted cross section is by far the largest of all low-energy neutrino couplings. This mode of interaction offers new opportunities to study neutrino properties and leads to a miniaturization of detector size, with potential technological applications. We observed this process at a 6.7σ confidence level, using a low-background, 14.6-kilogram CsI[Na] scintillator exposed to the neutrino emissions from the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Characteristic signatures in energy and time, predicted by the standard model for this process, were observed in high signal-to-background conditions. Improved constraints on nonstandard neutrino interactions with quarks are derived from this initial data set.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36f579ed5b005b950a5aa33b5329c73c170f0836

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• Neutrino Oscillations and Non-standard Interactions (2017, background): “Indeed, after the recent observation of such process at the COHERENT experiment [119], a combined analysis of neutrino oscillation data including the observed number of events in this experiment has excluded the LMA-D solution (for up and down quarks) at the 3σ level [120].”
• Neutrino non-standard interactions: A status report (2019, methodology): “Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS), which has been recently observed by the COHERENT collaboration [7], provides a new approach to searching for new physics beyond the standard model.”
• COHERENT Collaboration data release from the first observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (2018, methodology): “[1], these timing distributions were multiplied with beam-exposure normalized PDFs describing expected count rates in terms of photoelectrons.”
• Testing large non-standard neutrino interactions with arbitrary mediator mass after COHERENT data (2018, methodology): “The most recent probe of NSI comes from the observation of Coherent Elastic νNucleus Scattering (CEνNS) by the COHERENT experiment [11].”