Data analysis strategy used for the detection of CNO solar neutrinos with Borexino

Abstract

Borexino is a large liquid scintillator experiment located at the underground INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, in Italy. It was designed and built with the primary goal of real-time detection of low energy solar neutrinos, and in more than ten years of data taking it has measured all the neutrino fluxes produced in the proton-proton chain, i.e. the main fusion process accounting for 99% of the energy production in the Sun. Recently, after improvements and developments in both hardware and software, Borexino has provided the first observation of solar neutrinos emitted from the subdominant Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen (CNO) fusion cycle. All the crucial steps of the analysis strategy adopted to disentangle the signal of CNO neutrinos from backgrounds present in the detector will be described in this article.