Neutrino Backgrounds in Future Liquid Noble Element Dark Matter Direct Detection Experiments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how neutrino backgrounds affect future liquid noble gas dark matter detectors, emphasizing the importance of understanding neutrino flux uncertainties and detector efficiencies to improve discovery potential.

Contribution

It provides a detailed assessment of neutrino-induced backgrounds and explores strategies like combining different detector materials to enhance sensitivity.

Findings

Neutrino backgrounds pose a significant challenge for large-scale dark matter detectors.

Uncertainties in atmospheric neutrino flux impact the detection sensitivity.

Combining data from argon and xenon detectors can significantly improve discovery reach.

Abstract

Experiments that use liquid noble gasses as target materials, such as argon and xenon, play a significant role in direct detection searches for WIMP(-like) dark matter. As these experiments grow in size, they will soon encounter a new background to their dark matter discovery potential from neutrino scattering off nuclei and electrons in their targets. Therefore, a better understanding of this new source of background is crucial for future large-scale experiments such as ARGO and DARWIN. In this work, we study the impact of atmospheric neutrino flux uncertainties, electron recoil rejection efficiency, recoil energy sensitivity, and other related factors on the dark matter discovery reach. We also show that a significant improvement in sensitivity can potentially be obtained, at large exposures, by combining data from independent argon and xenon experiments.