Neutrino-Nuclear Coherent Scattering and the Effective Neutrino Charge Radius

Abstract

We propose to extract the value of the effective neutrino charge radius from the coherent scattering of a neutrino against a heavy nucleus. In such an experiment the relevant quantity to measure is the kinetic energy distribution of the recoiling nucleus, which, in turn, may be directly related to the shift in the value of the effective weak mixing angle produced by the neutrino charge radius. This type of experiment has been proposed in order to observe the coherent elastic neutrino-nuclear scattering for the first time. If interpreted in the way suggested in this work, such an experiment would constitute the first terrestrial attempt to measure this intrinsic electromagnetic property of the neutrino.