Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) can be used to determine the neutron part of nuclear form factors, unlocking intrinsic properties of nuclear structure. In contrast with other such methods, CEvNS is free from both strong interaction effects and Coulomb distortions. We propose precision measurements of CEvNS with an upcoming accelerator facility and determine the corresponding requirements for such a neutrino detector. We find that most significant backgrounds come from fast neutrons, induced by cosmogenic muons or from the pion decays at rest in the target station. With ton-scale liquid noble gas detectors, we will not only achieve percent level precision in the measurement of neutron radii but also clarify contributions of higher-order moments to nuclear form factors.
@article{arxiv.1801.02166,
title = {Extracting nuclear form factors with coherent neutrino scattering},
author = {Emilio Ciuffoli and Jarah Evslin and Qiang Fu and Jian Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02166},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
19 pages, 8 figures. Match the published version and include a discussion of the detector's energy threshold on the precision of form factor measurements in the appendix