Constraining Non-Standard Interactions with Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering at the European Spallation Source

TL;DR

This paper explores how the European Spallation Source can be used to measure coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering with advanced detectors to constrain non-standard neutrino interactions, improving sensitivity and reducing parameter degeneracies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the potential sensitivity of ESS detectors to non-standard neutrino interactions, including combined detector strategies to enhance constraints.

Findings

Operating two detectors improves sensitivity to NSI parameters.

Combining detectors helps reduce degeneracies between NSI parameters.

Three years of data can significantly constrain flavor-diagonal NSI.

Abstract

The European Spallation Source (ESS), currently under construction in Sweden, will provide an intense pulsed neutrino flux allowing for high-statistics measurements of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE{\nu}NS) with advanced nuclear recoil detectors. In this paper, we investigate in detail the possibility of constraining non-standard neutrino interactions (NSIs) through such precision CE{\nu}NS measurements at the ESS, considering the different proposed detection technologies, either alone or in combination. We first study the sensitivity to neutral-current NSI parameters that each detector can reach in 3 years of data taking. We then show that operating two detectors simultaneously can significantly improve the expected sensitivity on flavor-diagonal NSI parameters. Combining the results of two detectors turns out to be even more useful when two NSI parameters are assumed to be nonvanishing at a time. In this case, suitably chosen detector combinations can reduce the degeneracies between some pairs of NSI parameters to a small region of the parameter space.