Overview

Weak elastic scattering of leptons from nuclei is a powerful channel to expose important nuclear matter properties and to study fundamental interactions providing a broad reach into several physics disciplines. In particular, the weak neutral current coupling is much larger for the neutron than the proton, providing a clear opportunity to obtain precise information on the ground state neutron distributions. This information is critical in constraining the structure of symmetric nuclei and the neutron matter equation of state, which governs a host of processes involving both terrestrial nuclei and exotic astrophysical systems.

A program to study the weak nature of nuclei is experimentally very challenging due to the small coupling of the interaction and also, in the case of neutrinos, the detection of final states. As such, there is comparatively very little information on the structure of nuclei from neutral current coherent processes nor is there precision data on the couplings. New experimental programs have become possible with modern facilities and detector technologies and the efforts from the PREX and COHERENT collaborations have yielded their first results with exciting new upcoming experimental programs in the future.

This workshop will bring together theorists and experimentalists working in weak elastic nuclear scattering measurements, nuclear theory and structure, nuclear astrophysics, and beyond the standard model physics. We plan to foster discussion of the common and complementary goals of the COHERENT and PREX/CREX programs, as well as identify any new measurements or theoretical calculations that are needed.

Topics