Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Physics and Astronomy Dept.
Advisor(s)
Kelly Patton
Abstract
Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering is a process that involves the neutral-current scattering of a neutrino with an entire nucleus, which probes more bulk properties of the nucleus. Using the Taylor expansion of the form factors and calculation of effective moments that sums over isotopes, we successfully simulate the events for coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering for detectors using Ar and Ge and demonstrate that coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering can determine both the second moment and the fourth moment. Running the Monte Carlo simulation using a detector filled with 10 tonnes of natural germanium, a neutrino flux of 3*10^7 neutrinos per second per cm squared, and a bin size of 5 keV, we demonstrate that the neutron radii can be determined with less than 1% uncertainty if the detector efficiency remains constant and that a lower energy threshold can lead to a more accurate result.
Keywords
Neutron Density Distributions, Neutron Radius, CEvNS, Nuclear Form Factor, Monte Carlo Simulations, Python
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Hongyong, "Effects of Energy Resolution and Bin Size on the Measurements of Nuclear Neutron Distributions Using Coherent Elastic Neutrino-nucleus Scattering" (2020). Honors Theses. Paper 981.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/981