Sensitivity to neutrinos from the solar CNO cycle in Borexino

Abstract

Neutrinos emitted in the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen (CNO) fusion cycle in the Sun are a sub-dominant, yet crucial component of solar neutrinos whose flux has not been measured yet. The Borexino experiment at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (Italy) has a unique opportunity to detect them directly thanks to the detector's radiopurity and the precise understanding of the detector backgrounds. We discuss the sensitivity of Borexino to CNO neutrinos, which is based on the strategies we adopted to constrain the rates of the two most relevant background sources, pep neutrinos from the solar pp-chain and Bi-210 beta decays originating in the intrinsic contamination of the liquid scintillator with Pb-210. Assuming the CNO flux predicted by the high-metallicity Standard Solar Model and an exposure of 1000 daysx71.3 t, Borexino has a median sensitivity to CNO neutrino higher than 3 sigma. With the same hypothesis the expected experimental uncertainty on the CNO neutrino flux is 23%, provided the uncertainty on the independent estimate of the Bi-210 interaction rate is 1.5 cpd/100t. Finally, we evaluated the expected uncertainty of the C and N abundances and the expected discrimination significance between the high and low metallicity Standard Solar Models (HZ and LZ) with future more precise measurement of the CNO solar neutrino flux.

16 pages, 12 figures

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Experimental evidence of neutrinos produced in the CNO fusion cycle in the Sun
• The Future of Solar Neutrinos
• Improved measurement of solar neutrinos from the Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen cycle by Borexino and its implications for the Standard Solar Model
• Final results of Borexino on CNO solar neutrinos
• MeV-scale performance of water-based and pure liquid scintillator detectors
• First Directional Measurement of sub-MeV Solar Neutrinos with Borexino
• An Active-to-Sterile Neutrino Transition Dipole Moment and the XENON1T Excess
• Correlated and Integrated Directionality for sub-MeV solar neutrinos in Borexino
• Borexino results on neutrinos from the Sun and Earth
• Revisiting pseudo-Dirac neutrino scenario after recent solar neutrino data
• Z-portal Continuum Dark Matter
• Terrestrial Probes of Electromagnetically Interacting Dark Radiation
• Testing the Gallium Anomaly
• Novel techniques for alpha/beta pulse shape discrimination in Borexino
• Study of neutron production for 360 GeV cosmic muons
• Identification of the cosmogenic ${}^{11}$C background in large volumes of liquid scintillators with Borexino