Detecting Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in a Heavy Water Cherenkov Detector at the SNS

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the COHERENT collaboration completed construction of a heavy water Cherenkov detector in the summer of 2023 to measure the neutrino flux from the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) via the scattering of neutrinos on deuterium nuclei, with the primary aim of improving the precision of past and future CEvNS measurements. Thus far, the SNS neutrino flux has been predicted theoretically with a precision of around 10%, but direct experimental measurements are expected to improve that precision to 2-3% within five SNS-years. An unavoidable background to neutrino-deuterium scattering in heavy water is neutrino-oxygen scattering, but this also gives us the opportunity to measure the cross section of neutrino-nucleus charged-current interactions on both deuterium and oxygen nuclei. Both charged-current neutrino-deuterium and neutrino-oxygen reactions produce electrons that emit Cherenkov radiation within the detector, which can be detected by photomultiplier tubes. The SNS is the most powerful pulsed source of accelerator-based neutrinos in the world, which produces electron neutrinos in a similar energy range to supernova neutrinos. Thus the measurement of this charged-current neutrino reaction in oxygen can improve future supernova neutrino detection, even as the simultaneous measurement of the charged-current neutrino reaction in deuterium can improve our understanding of the SNS neutrino flux. In this presentation, I plan on showing preliminary data collected from our detector for one year of SNS operation.