Reactor CEνNS Physics Reach with an SBC Liquid Argon Bubble Chamber

The large flux of ~MeV neutrinos that nuclear reactors generate offer an excellent opportunity to study Coherent Elastic neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEνNS), but reactors also produce significant backgrounds. The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is currently constructing a 10-kg liquid argon scintillating bubble chamber at Fermilab. The detector’s target threshold is 100 eV in order to demonstrate sensitivities to sub-keV nuclear recoils while remaining highly insensitive to electron recoil backgrounds. This talk presents a physics reach analysis of such a detector for reactor CEνNS experiments. Specifically, for studying the sensitivities to the weak mixing angle, neutrino magnetic moment, and a light Z gauge boson mediator. Monte Carlo simulations assess the background’s contribution to the signal, and silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) can measure scintillation light to maximize background rejection. Nearly mono-energetic photoneutron sources can calibrate the detector for nuclear recoils below 8 keV and gamma sources can use Thomson scattering to probe the nucleation efficiency function near the target threshold.