Abstract
Large liquid xenon detectors aiming for dark matter direct detection will soon become viable tools also for investigating neutrino physics. Information on the effects of nuclear structure in neutrino-nucleus scattering can be important in distinguishing neutrino backgrounds in such detectors. We perform calculations for differential and total cross sections of neutral-current neutrino scattering off the most abundant xenon isotopes. The nuclear-structure calculations are made in the nuclear shell model for elastic scattering and also in the quasiparticle random-phase approximation (QRPA) and microscopic quasiparticle-phonon model (MQPM) for both elastic and inelastic scattering. Using suitable neutrino energy distributions, we compute estimates of total averaged cross sections for 8B solar neutrinos and supernova neutrinos.
Highlights
When the idea of neutrinos was first suggested by Pauli in 1930, it was thought that they would never be observed experimentally
We have computed total cross sections for coherent and inelastic neutrino-nucleus scattering as a function of the neutrino energy and averaged total cross sections for solar 8B neutrinos and supernova neutrinos scattering off the most abundant xenon isotopes
In the following calculations of averaged supernova neutrino cross sections we have used two different neutrino temperatures corresponding to different neutrino flavors
Summary
When the idea of neutrinos was first suggested by Pauli in 1930, it was thought that they would never be observed experimentally. Coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering is on one hand an important potential source of information for beyond-standard-model physics [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11], but on the other hand it may hinder new discoveries as it will start disturbing dark matter detectors in the near future. Similar computations of neutral-current neutrino-nucleus scattering cross sections have been made before for the stable cadmium isotopes in [26] and for molybdenum isotopes in [27].
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