Reactor neutrino applications and coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering

TL;DR

This paper reviews the progress in neutrino detection technologies, comparing inverse beta decay and coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering, highlighting their potential for nuclear security applications.

Contribution

It provides the first direct comparison of inverse beta decay and coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering for neutrino detection in nuclear security.

Findings

Recent detector advancements enable high-quality neutrino spectrum measurements.

Coherent elastic scattering has a large cross section and no energy threshold.

The paper discusses the potential of both reactions for security applications.

Abstract

Potential applications of neutrino detection to nuclear security have been discussed since the 1970s. Recent years have seen great progress in detector technologies based on inverse beta decay, with the demonstration of ton-scale surface-level detectors capable of high quality neutrino spectrum measurements. At the same time coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering has been experimentally confirmed in 2017 with neutrinos from stopped pion decay and there is a number of experiments aimed at seeing this reaction with reactor neutrinos. The large cross section and threshold-less nature of this reaction make it plausible to consider it for applications to nuclear security and here, we present a first direct comparison of the two reaction modes.