http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13986
Neutrinos from supernova (SN) bursts can give rise to detectable number of nuclear recoil (NR) events through the process of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) in future large (multi-ton scale) liquid xenon detectors employed for dark matter search depending on the SN progenitor mass and distance to the SN event. Here we point out that in addition to the direct NR events due to CE$\nu$NS process, there is a secondary source of nuclear recoils due to elastic scattering of the neutrons produced through inelastic neutrino-nucleus scattering of the supernova neutrinos with the target xenon nuclei. We estimate the contribution of these supernova neutrino-induced neutrons ($\nu$IN) to the total xenon NR spectrum and find that the latter can be significantly modified at large recoil energies from that expected from the CE$\nu$NS process alone, with the $\nu$IN contribution dominating the total recoil energy spectrum at recoil energies above $\sim$20 keV. With the capability to measure the energies of individual recoil events, sufficiently large liquid xenon detectors may be able to detect these events due to $\nu$IN process triggered by neutrinos from reasonably close by SN burst events. We also note that the $\nu$IN contribution to the recoil spectrum receives dominant contribution from the charged current interaction of the SN $\nu_e$s with the target nuclei while the CE$\nu$NS contribution comes from neutral current interactions of all the six species of neutrinos with the target nuclei. This may offer the possibility of extracting useful information about the distribution of the total SN explosion energy going into different neutrino flavors.
P. Bhattacharjee, A. Bandyopadhyay, S. Chakraborty, et. al.
Tue, 29 Dec 20
19/66
Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures
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