Rebecca Rapp (CMU)
Date: Tue. September 28th, 2021, 11:30 am-12:30 pmLocation: Foldy room
Phenomenal cosmic insights; itty bitty recoils — CEvNS and the COHERENT experiment
Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) is the neutral current process by which an incident neutrino interacts (coherently) with a whole nucleus and causes a *teensy* nuclear recoil (the only experimental observable). This Standard Model process was predicted more than 40 years ago, but it was unambiguously observed for the first time only after decades of advancement enabled the detection of such small recoils. In 2017, the COHERENT experiment made the first CEvNS observation on CsI at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then followed up with CEvNS measurements on a second nuclear target (Ar) in 2020. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of CEvNS and discuss the broad physics reach of searching for small nuclear recoils, then detail the efforts of the COHERENT experiment at the Spallation Neutron Source and the strategy for making precision CEvNS cross-section measurements.
Host: Yu-Hao Sun