The physics potential of a reactor neutrino experiment with Skipper-CCDs: Searching for new physics with light mediators

TL;DR

This paper assesses the potential of a Skipper-CCD based reactor neutrino experiment to detect light, weakly coupled new physics, such as neutrino magnetic moments and light mediators, with high sensitivity and relevance to existing anomalies.

Contribution

It introduces the vIOLETA experiment concept and evaluates its sensitivity to new physics models, including potential explanations for the XENON1T excess.

Findings

High sensitivity to light mediators and neutrino magnetic moments.

Potential to test explanations for the XENON1T event excess.

Sensitivity depends on experimental setup and flux uncertainties.

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.