Prospects of supernova neutrino burst detection with COHERENT

All six flavors of neutrinos are ejected during core-collapse supernovae in a burst lasting tens of seconds. Since neutrinos carry away the vast majority of the explosion’s energy, detecting a core-collapse neutrino burst will give insight into the neutrino mass ordering and oscillation parameters as well as interesting astrophysics. Galactic supernova occur only a few times a century, and the neutrino community holds supernova preparedness among its chief priorities.

The COHERENT collaboration operates a multi-target suite of low-threshold neutrino detectors at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These detectors are uniquely equipped to observe the low-energy (E_ν ~ tens of MeV) interaction coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS). CEvNS is a neutral-current process that dominates the detected interaction rate in the core-collapse supernova burst energy range (tens of MeV), and a measurement of CEvNS activity during such a burst will help constrain total flux and energy parameters. The prospects for supernova burst observation in COHERENT detectors will be presented, as well as some of the key considerations for outfitting a mid-size detector for supernova sensitivity.