Abstract
The observation of coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEνNS) by the COHERENT collaboration in 2017 has opened a new window to both test Standard Model predictions at relatively low energies and probe new physics scenarios. Our investigations show, however, that a careful treatment of the statistical methods used to analyze the data is essential to derive correct constraints and bounds on new physics parameters. In this manuscript we perform a detailed analysis of the publicly available COHERENT CsI data making use of all available background data. We point out that Wilks’ theorem is not fulfilled in general and a calculation of the confidence regions via Monte Carlo simulations following a Feldman-Cousins procedure is necessary. As an example for the necessity of this approach to test new physics scenarios we quantify the allowed ranges for several scenarios with neutrino non-standard interactions. Furthermore, we provide accompanying code to enable an easy implementation of other new physics scenarios as well as data files of our results: https://github.com/JuliaGehrlein/7stats.
Highlights
In this manuscript we will revisit and go beyond previous analyses to derive statistically robust constraints on SM and BSM parameters using the publicly available data from the COHERENT CsI observation [74]
We find that the test statistic for the CsI data is not distributed according to a χ2 distribution with the number of degrees of freedom given by the number of energy and timing bins making a calculation of the p value via Monte Carlo (MC) simulations with the Feldman-Cousins [75] approach necessary
As concrete examples we show the difference between our statistical approach and commonly used incorrect approaches for the case of the SM prediction as well as for non standard interactions
Summary
In this manuscript we will revisit and go beyond previous analyses to derive statistically robust constraints on SM and BSM parameters using the publicly available data from the COHERENT CsI observation [74]. We find that the test statistic for the CsI data is not distributed according to a χ2 distribution with the number of degrees of freedom given by the number of energy and timing bins making a calculation of the p value via Monte Carlo (MC) simulations with the Feldman-Cousins [75] approach necessary. We provide our results in the form of data files which can be downloaded from the same source This manuscript is organized as follows: in section 2 we will give an overview of the COHERENT experiment and the CEνNS process, in section 3 we describe the calculation of the signal and background events at the COHERENT CsI detector.
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