The physics potential of a reactor neutrino experiment with Skipper CCDs: measuring the weak mixing angle

Abstract

We analyze in detail the physics potential of an experiment like the one recently proposed by the vIOLETA collaboration: a kilogram-scale Skipper CCD detector deployed 12 meters away from a commercial nuclear reactor core. This experiment would be able to detect coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering from reactor neutrinos, capitalizing on the exceptionally low ionization energy threshold of Skipper CCDs. To estimate the physics reach, we elect the measurement of the weak mixing angle as a case study. We choose a realistic benchmark experimental setup and perform variations on this benchmark to understand the role of quenching factor and its systematic uncertainties, background rate and spectral shape, total exposure, and reactor antineutrino flux uncertainty. We take full advantage of the reactor flux measurement of the Daya Bay collaboration to perform a data driven analysis which is, up to a certain extent, independent of the theoretical un- certainties on the reactor antineutrino flux. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, this experimental setup may provide a competitive measurement of the weak mixing angle at few MeV scale with neutrino-nucleus scattering.