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

Abstract

Both the neutron skin thickness $\Delta R_{np}$ of atomic nuclei and the low-energy neutrino-nucleon ($\nu N$) 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$\nu$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 $\theta_W$ in low-energy $\nu N$ interactions, leading to an effective weak mixing angle $\theta^*_W$. By analyzing the CE$\nu$NS data of the COHERENT experiment, we find that while a one-parameter fit to the COHERENT data by varying $\Delta R_{np}$ produces $\Delta R^{\rm{CsI}}_{np} \simeq 0.68^{+0.91}_{-1.13}$ fm for CsI with an unrealistically large central value by fixing $\sin^2 \theta^*_W$ at the low-energy SM value of $\sin^2\theta_W^{\rm{SM}} = 0.23857$, a two-dimensional fit by varying $\Delta R_{np}$ and $\sin^2 \theta^*_W$ leads to a strong positive correlation between $\Delta R_{np}$ and $\sin^2 \theta^*_W$ with significantly smaller central values of $\Delta R^{\rm {CsI}}_{np} \simeq 0.24_{-2.03}^{+2.30}$ fm and $\sin^2 \theta^*_W = 0.21_{-0.10}^{+0.13}$. Although the uncertainty is too large to claim a determination of $\Delta R^{\rm{CsI}}_{np}$ and $\sin^2 \theta^*_W$, the present study suggests that the multi-dimensional fit is important in future analyses of high-precision CE$\nu$NS data. The implication of the possible deviation of $\sin^2 \theta^*_W$ from $\sin^2\theta_W^{\rm{SM}}$ on new physics beyond the SM is also discussed.