Coherency in Neutrino-Nucleus Elastic Scattering

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum coherency effects in neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering, analyzing how experimental parameters influence decoherence and the potential to probe physics beyond the standard model.

Contribution

It introduces a parameter to quantify coherency and studies its dependence on neutrino energy, detector thresholds, and target nuclei, providing insights for experimental design.

Findings

Defined a coherency parameter ($$) to quantify decoherence.

Identified energy ranges where coherency remains high ($$>0.95).

Explored how different experimental setups can probe beyond-standard-model physics.

Abstract

Neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering provides a unique laboratory to study the quantum mechanical coherency effects in electroweak interactions, towards which several experimental programs are being actively pursued. We report results of our quantitative studies on the transitions towards decoherency. A parameter ($\alpha$) is identified to describe the degree of coherency, and its variations with incoming neutrino energy, detector threshold and target nucleus are studied. The ranges of $\alpha$ which can be probed with realistic neutrino experiments are derived, indicating complementarity between projects with different sources and targets. Uncertainties in nuclear physics and in $\alpha$ would constrain sensitivities in probing physics beyond the standard model. The maximum neutrino energies corresponding to $\alpha$>0.95 are derived.