Exploring low-energy neutrino physics with the Coherent Neutrino Nucleus Interaction Experiment (CONNIE)

Understand

The Coherent Neutrino-Nucleus Interaction Experiment (CONNIE) uses low-noise fully depleted charge-coupled devices (CCDs) with the goal of measuring low-energy recoils from coherent elastic scattering (CE$\nu$NS) of reactor antineutrinos with silicon nuclei and testing nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI).

• We report here the first results of the detector array deployed in 2016, considering an active mass 47.6 g (8 CCDs), which is operating at a distance of 30 m from the core of the Angra 2 nuclear reactor, with a thermal power of 3.8 GW.
• A search for neutrino events is performed by comparing data collected with reactor on (2.1 kg-day) and reactor off (1.6 kg-day).
• The results show no excess in the reactor-on data, reaching the world record sensitivity down to recoil energies of about 1 keV (0.1 keV electron-equivalent).