Low-energy electronic recoil in xenon detectors by solar neutrinos

Abstract

Low-energy electronic recoil caused by solar neutrinos in multi-ton xenon detectors is an important subject not only because it is a source of the irreducible background for direct searches of weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but also because it provides a viable way to measure the solar pp and 7Be neutrinos at the precision level of current standard solar model predictions. In this work we perform ab initio many-body calculations for the structure, photoionization, and neutrino-ionization of xenon. It is found that the atomic binding effect yields a sizable suppression to the neutrino-electron scattering cross section at low recoil energies. Compared with the previous calculation based on the free electron picture, our calculated event rate of electronic recoil in the same detector configuration is reduced by about 23%. We present in this paper the electronic recoil rate spectrum in the energy window of 100 eV to 30 keV with the standard per ton per year normalization for xenon detectors, and discuss its implication for low energy solar neutrino detection as the signal and WIMP search as a source of background.