Exploring the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes with Coherent Neutrino Scattering

TL;DR

This paper explores how neutrinos from collapsing supermassive stars could be detected on Earth using large-scale dark matter detectors, potentially revealing the origins of supermassive black holes.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of observing neutrinos from supermassive star collapses with upcoming large-scale detectors, linking neutrino detection to black hole formation.

Findings

Upcoming detectors can observe neutrinos from supermassive star collapses up to 10 Mpc.

Neutrino bursts from these collapses can exceed supernova neutrino luminosities.

Detection could provide insights into the early universe and black hole origins.

Abstract

Collapsing supermassive stars ($M \gtrsim 3 \times 10^4 M_{\odot}$) at high redshifts can naturally provide seeds and explain the origin of the supermassive black holes observed in the centers of nearly all galaxies. During the collapse of supermassive stars, a burst of non-thermal neutrinos is generated with a luminosity that could greatly exceed that of a conventional core collapse supernova explosion. In this work, we investigate the extent to which the neutrinos produced in these explosions can be observed via coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS). Large scale direct dark matter detection experiments provide particularly favorable targets. We find that upcoming $\mathcal{O}(100)$ tonne-scale experiments will be sensitive to the collapse of individual supermassive stars at distances as large as $\mathcal{O}(10)$ Mpc.