New Physics versus Quenching Factors in Coherent Neutrino Scattering

Abstract

Recent results on the Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CE$\nu$NS) on germanium present significant discrepancies among experiments. We perform a combined analysis of the Dresden-II, CONUS+ and COHERENT data, quantifying the impact of quenching factor uncertainties on their CE$\nu$NS cross section measurement. No choice of quenching factor can bring these three data sets into mutual agreement, whereas the combination of COHERENT with either Dresden-II or CONUS+ agrees well albeit for very different quenching factors. We further study the quenching factor dependence on the sensitivity of these experiments to a large neutrino magnetic moment, finding that the constraints can vary by up to an order of magnitude. Our work highlights the importance of reducing this uncertainty on quenching factors in order to probe new physics from neutrinos at the low-energy frontier.