Exploring the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes with Coherent Neutrino Scattering

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$\hat{I}½$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.

9 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables; v2: matches published version