Prospects for detecting neutrino fog events in liquid argon-based dark matter experiments

• Grant number: 24/19553-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - Elementary Particle Physics and Fields
• Principal Investigator: Edivaldo Moura Santos
• Grantee: Christopher Dorvino Reis
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/11489-7 - Dark matter searches, AP.ESP

Abstract

Sources at Earth and outside our planet generate neutrinos with an energy spectrum that goes from hundreds of MeV to tens of TeV. With the increase in size of detectors used for dark matter (DM) searches, it has been soon recognized that these detectors would at some point start seeing events associated to the flux of neutrinos produced in the sun, in the Earth's crust (geo-neutrinos), in nuclear reactors, in the atmosphere due to cosmic ray interactions and in supernova explosions. The flux of these neutrinos is what is called the neutrino fog and will represent a source of background for DM searches if the limits on the dark-to-standard model matter interaction cross section keeps being lowered as detectors get bigger. Since the first indications of solar neutrinos interacting with a liquid xenon detector (XENONnT) have been recently announced, and given that there is a global effort to scale up the size of liquid argon (LAr) detectors, DarkSide-20k, with 20 tonnes of LAr to be operated at Gran Sasso being the first such major step, this DD project aims at making forecasts for the detection of neutrino fog events in a LAr target.