Abstract
We explore the sensitivity to new physics of the recently proposed vIOLETA experiment: a 10 kg Skipper Charged Coupled Device detector deployed 12 meters away from a commercial nuclear reactor core. We investigate two broad classes of models which benefit from the very low energy recoil threshold of these detectors, namely neutrino magnetic moments and light mediators coupled to neutrinos and quarks or electrons. We find that this experimental setup is very sensitive to light, weakly coupled new physics, and in particular that it could probe potential explanations of the event excess observed in XENON1T. We also provide a detailed study on the dependence of the sensitivity on the experimental setup assumptions and on the neutrino flux systematic uncertainties.
Highlights
ΣaB 1.2%Reactor power σW 5%Relative rate per fission σq 5%to the normalization of the background, the reactor power and the fission fraction for each isotope
We can see that the new physics signal is significantly enhanced at low recoils, which shows the relevance of the low energy threshold of Skipper-CCD detectors when probing these beyond standard model (BSM) scenarios
In this paper we have evaluated the sensitivity of the vIOLETA experiment — a 10 kg Skipper-CCD detector deployed 12 meters from a commercial nuclear reactor core — to light, weakly coupled, beyond standard model scenarios
Summary
Given the large statistics expected in a reactor experiment using the Skipper-CCD technology — O(105) CEvNS events for a 2 GWth reactor, and 3 kg-year exposure, — we can anticipate improvements on existing constraints on physics beyond the Standard Model. We will focus on two main categories for such BSM scenarios: first, models which alter specific neutrino properties, such as its magnetic moment; and second, additional lowenergy interactions mediated by new, light degrees of freedom which impact the scattering rate of neutrinos with the targets on the detector. In order to grasp the effect of BSM scenarios, let us first establish our notation by formulating the SM cross sections for the relevant scatterings that will be considered, neutrino-electron elastic scatterring and CEvNS. Neutrino-electron elastic scattering is one of the most relevant and well-known neutrino scattering channels. Since the reactor flux is composed only by electron antineutrinos, let us first record the differential cross section for νe + e− → νe + e− in terms of the electron recoil energy ER, dσνe
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