Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Physics

Major Professor

Yuri Efremenko

Committee Members

Yuri Efremenko, Yuri Kamyshkov, Robert Grzywacz, Jason Hayward, Tova Holmes

Abstract

Neutrinos are approaching their 100th anniversary, and much is yet unknown about this elusive particle. Decades apart, neutrinos went from being hypothetical particles, to experimentally detected, having multiple families, and being closely related to fundamental physics questions. Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) was predicted in 1974 and was only observed more than 40 years later by the COHERENT Collaboration.

The UTK neutrino group took lead in design construction, commissioning, and data analysis for the heavy-water detector. This detector is part of the overall COHERENT Collaboration strategy to measure the neutrino flux at the Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with high precision, by making use of the well-known neutrino-deuteron interaction cross section. This measurement will greatly improve COHERENT data analysis, and sensitivity to physics beyond the standard model, from past, present, and future neutrino experiments at the SNS.

My work, detailed in this dissertation, involved constructing the detector, R&D in what materials to use for construction, testing, data analysis, and Monte Carlo simulations - successfully proving the detector proof of concept. The detector is in stable operation for more than a year, with a blind schematic for data analysis. Results from my simulations for background and neutrino signal predictions will be used in the unblinding procedure.

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