Neutron Skin in CsI and Low-Energy Effective Weak Mixing Angle from COHERENT Data

Abstract

Both the neutron skin thickness $ΔR_{np}$ of atomic nuclei and the low-energy neutrino-nucleon ($νN$) interactions are of fundamental importance in nuclear and particle physics, astrophysics as well as new physics beyond the standard model (SM) but largely uncertain currently, and the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$ν$NS) provides a clean way to extract their information. New physics beyond the SM may cause effectively a shift of the SM weak mixing angle $θ_W$ in low-energy $νN$ interactions, leading to an effective weak mixing angle $θ^*_W$. By analyzing the CE$ν$NS data of the COHERENT experiment, we find that while a one-parameter fit to the COHERENT data by varying $ΔR_{np}$ produces $ΔR^{\rm{CsI}}_{np} \simeq 0.68^{+0.91}_{-1.13}$ fm for CsI with an unrealistically large central value by fixing $\sin^2 θ^*_W$ at the low-energy SM value of $\sin^2θ_W^{\rm{SM}} = 0.23857$, a two-dimensional fit by varying $ΔR_{np}$ and $\sin^2 θ^*_W$ leads to a strong positive correlation between $ΔR_{np}$ and $\sin^2 θ^*_W$ with significantly smaller central values of $ΔR^{\rm {CsI}}_{np} \simeq 0.24_{-2.03}^{+2.30}$ fm and $\sin^2 θ^*_W = 0.21_{-0.10}^{+0.13}$. Although the uncertainty is too large to claim a determination of $ΔR^{\rm{CsI}}_{np}$ and $\sin^2 θ^*_W$, the present study suggests that the multi-dimensional fit is important in future analyses of high-precision CE$ν$NS data. The implication of the possible deviation of $\sin^2 θ^*_W$ from $\sin^2θ_W^{\rm{SM}}$ on new physics beyond the SM is also discussed.