Speaker
Prof.
Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano
(MIT)
Description
Coherent elastic neutrino- and WIMP-nucleus interaction signatures are expected to be quite similar. Next-generation ton-scale dark matter detectors could discover neutrino-nucleus coherent scattering in an underground laboratory. A high intensity pion- and muon- decay-at-rest neutrino source recently proposed for oscillation physics at underground laboratories would provide the neutrinos for these measurements. We show that discovery of this interaction is possible with a 2 ton year exposure of a ton-scale experiment such as GEODM. Furthermore, a dedicated coherent scattering experiment using low-temperature Ge crystals and/or nobel liquids placed close (~10 m) to the neutrino source would see hundreds to thousands of events per year. These higher statistics would enable new limits on non-standard neutrino interactions and searches for sterile neutrinos through short-baseline oscillations. We discuss the potential sensitivity of such an experiment to light sterile neutrino models with Delta m^2 of order 1 eV^2, a region that contains the best-fit 3+1 and 3+2 models to LSND and MiniBooNE data.
Primary author
Prof.
Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano
(MIT)
Co-authors
Mr
A. Anderson
(MIT)
Ms
C. Ignarra
(MIT)
Dr
G. Karagiorgi
(Columbia University)
Prof.
J. M. Conrad
(MIT)
Dr
J. Spitz
(Yale University)
Prof.
K. Scholberg
(Duke University)
Prof.
M. H. Shaevitz
(Columbia University)
