Atmospheric neutrinos in a next-generation xenon dark matter experiment

We study the sensitivity of future xenon- and argon-based dark matter and neutrino detection experiments to low-energy atmospheric neutrinos. Not accounting for experimental backgrounds, the primary obstacle for identifying nuclear recoils induced by atmospheric neutrinos is the tail of the electron recoil distribution due to $pp$ solar neutrinos. We use the NEST code to model the solar and atmospheric neutrino signals in a xenon detector and find that an exposure of 700 tonne-years will produce a $5σ$ detection of atmospheric neutrinos. We explore the effect of different detector properties and find that a sufficiently long electron lifetime is essential to the success of such a measurement.

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