Solar neutrino detection in liquid xenon detectors via charged-current scattering to excited states
S. J. Haselschwardt, B. G. Lenardo, Pekka Pirinen, J. Suhonen
Abstract
We investigate the prospects for real-time detection of solar neutrinos via the charged-current neutrino-nucleus scattering process in liquid xenon time projection chambers. We use a nuclear shell model, benchmarked with experimental data, to calculate the cross sections for populating specific excited states of the cesium nuclei produced by neutrino capture on $^{131}\mathrm{Xe}$ and $^{136}\mathrm{Xe}$. The shell model is further used to compute the decay schemes of the low-lying ${1}^{+}$ excited states of $^{136}\mathrm{Cs}$, for which there is sparse experimental data. We explore the possibility of tagging the characteristic deexcitation $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ rays/conversion electrons using two techniques: spatial separation of their energy deposits using event topology and their time separation using delayed coincidence. The efficiencies in each case are evaluated within a range of realistic detector parameters. We find that the topological signatures are likely to be dominated by radon backgrounds, but that a delayed-coincidence signature from long-lived states predicted in $^{136}\mathrm{Cs}$ may enable background-free detection of CNO neutrino interactions in next-generation experiments with smaller uncertainty than current measurements. We also estimate the sensitivity as a function of exposure for detecting the solar-temperature-induced line shift in $^{7}\mathrm{Be}$ neutrino emission, which may provide a new test of solar models.