In 2013 a group of physicists came together at the Shull Wollan Center. The Shull Wollan Center is a joint Institute for Neutron Science between the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Lab named after Nobel Prize winner Clifford Shull and Ernest Wollan who developed the science of neutron diffraction at ORNL. At that meeting, they decided to create a collaboration to make the first-ever observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering using the world-class neutrino source at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Lab.

 

The collaboration currently consists of 21 institutions from 4 countries (USA, Russia, Canada, South Korea) who have come together to deploy a suite of detector systems at the SNS and make an unambiguous observation of CEvNS using the dependence of the cross section on the number of neutrons squared. Visit the COHERENT project at Duke.edu