English

New insights into nuclear physics and weak mixing angle using electroweak probes

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2022-01-05 v3 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

Using the new results on coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering data in cesium-iodide provided by the COHERENT experiment, we determine a new measurement of the average neutron rms radius of 133Cs^{133}\text{Cs} and 127I^{127}\text{I}. In combination with the atomic parity violation (APV) experimental result, we derive the most precise measurement of the neutron rms radii of 133Cs^{133}\text{Cs} and 127I^{127}\text{I}, disentangling for the first time the contributions of the two nuclei. By exploiting these measurements we determine the corresponding neutron skin values for 133Cs^{133}\text{Cs} and 127I^{127}\text{I}. These results suggest a preference for models which predict large neutron skin values, as corroborated by the only other electroweak measurements of the neutron skin of 208Pb^{208}\text{Pb} performed by PREX experiments. Moreover, for the first time, we obtain a data-driven APV+COHERENT measurement of the low-energy weak mixing angle with a percent uncertainty, independent of the value of the average neutron rms radius of 133Cs^{133}\text{Cs} and 127I^{127}\text{I}, that is allowed to vary freely in the fit. The value of the low-energy weak mixing angle that we found is slightly larger than the standard model prediction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.06153,
  title  = {New insights into nuclear physics and weak mixing angle using electroweak probes},
  author = {M. Cadeddu and N. Cargioli and F. Dordei and C. Giunti and Y. F. Li and E. Picciau and C. A. Ternes and Y. Y. Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.06153},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

11 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:04:43.590Z