First Observation Of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering

Understand

Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) has the largest predicted cross-section of all low-energy neutrino couplings.

• However, as a neutral-current interaction, the only experimental signature of CE$\nu$NS is a low-energy nuclear recoil, which made its detection challenging.
• CE$\nu$NS remained unobserved for over four decades.
• This thesis describes the experiment that resulted in a CE$\nu$NS observation at a 6.7-sigma confidence level.