Dissertation Title: TOWARDS AN IMPROVED MEASUREMENT OF THE CEVNS PROCESS WITH THE CENNS-10 LAR DETECTOR
Abstract: Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) is a neutral-current neutrino process in which a low-energy neutrino elastically scatters off a target nucleus. First proposed in 1974, despite being the dominant neutrino cross section below 100 MeV, CEvNS evaded detection until recently due to the low resulting nuclear recoil. The COHERENT Collaboration made the first observation of CEvNS using a 14.6-kg CsI[Na] scintillating crystal in 2017, and again in 2020 using a 24-kg single-phase liquid argon detector.
Following the 2020 result, the liquid argon detector continued to operate, tripling the amount of data collected in the previous analysis. For this larger data set, beam-related neutron and steady-state backgrounds were simulated and measured for a robust model of the full CENNS-10 data set. This analysis predicts an 8.5 σ rejection of the null-CEvNS hypothesis as well as 450+60 -60 CEvNS events.
