New physics versus quenching factors in Coherent Neutrino Scattering

Li, Yulun; Herrera, Gonzalo; Huber, Patrick

doi:10.1007/JHEP11(2025)022

New physics versus quenching factors in Coherent Neutrino Scattering

Journal Article · Wed Nov 05 00:00:00 EST 2025 · Journal of High Energy Physics (Online)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2025)022· OSTI ID:3008832

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Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ. (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, VA (United States)
Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ. (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, VA (United States); Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)

Recent results on the Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEνNS) on germanium present significant discrepancies among experiments. We perform a combined analysis of the Dresden-II, CONUS+ and COHERENT data, quantifying the impact of quenching factor uncertainties on their CEνNS cross section measurement. No choice of quenching factor can bring these three data sets into mutual agreement, whereas the combination of COHERENT with either Dresden-II or CONUS+ agrees well albeit for very different quenching factors. We further study the quenching factor dependence on the sensitivity of these experiments to a large neutrino magnetic moment, finding that the constraints can vary by up to an order of magnitude. Our work highlights the importance of reducing this uncertainty on quenching factors in order to probe new physics from neutrinos at the low-energy frontier.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ. (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, VA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0020262

OSTI ID:: 3008832

Journal Information:: Journal of High Energy Physics (Online), Journal Name: Journal of High Energy Physics (Online) Journal Issue: 11 Vol. 2025; ISSN 1029-8479

Publisher:: Springer NatureCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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