Extracting nuclear form factors with coherent neutrino scattering

2018/01/31 by Emilio Ciuffoli, Jarah Evslin, Qiang Fu +2 · 40 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Coulomb #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Electron #Muon #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutron #Nuclear physics #Nuclear structure #Optics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Pion #Scattering #hep-ex #hep-ph #physics.ins-det

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.97.113003

published in Physical review. D/Physical review. D. 97(11) (American Physical Society) · 19 pages, 8 figures. Match the published version and include a discussion of the detector's energy threshold on the precision of form factor measurements in the appendix

openalex publication_date 2018/06/15 · arxiv created 2018/08/17 · arxiv updated 2018/08/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE\ensuremathνNS) can be used to determine the neutron part of nuclear form factors, unlocking intrinsic properties of nuclear structure. In contrast with other such methods, CE\ensuremathνNS is free from both strong interaction effects and Coulomb distortions. We propose precision measurements of CE\ensuremathνNS with an upcoming accelerator facility and determine the corresponding requirements for such a neutrino detector. We find that most significant backgrounds come from fast neutrons, induced by cosmogenic muons or from the pion decays at rest in the target station. With ton-scale liquid noble gas detectors, we will not only achieve percent-level precision in the measurement of neutron radii but also clarify contributions of higher-order moments to nuclear form factors.

Citations

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