A Statistical Analysis of the COHERENT Data and Applications to New Physics

Understand

The observation of coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) by the COHERENT collaboration in 2017 has opened a new window to both test Standard Model predictions at relatively low energies and probe new physics scenarios.

• Our investigations show, however, that a careful treatment of the statistical methods used to analyze the data is essential to derive correct constraints and bounds on new physics parameters.
• In this manuscript we perform a detailed analysis of the publicly available COHERENT CsI data making use of all available background data.
• We point out that Wilks' theorem is not fulfilled in general and a calculation of the confidence regions via Monte Carlo simulations following a Feldman-Cousins procedure is necessary.