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arXiv · 2008.06062

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

Abstract

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. As an example for the necessity of this approach to test new physics scenarios we quantify the allowed ranges for several scenarios with neutrino non-standard interactions. Furthermore, we provide accompanying code to enable an easy implementation of other new physics scenarios as well as data files of our results.

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Peter B. Denton, Julia Gehrlein. 2020-08-13. A Statistical Analysis of the COHERENT Data and Applications to New Physics. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep04(2021)266

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