First measurement of a nuclear recoil signal from solar neutrinos with the XENONnT experiment in which VSI's Dr. Jelle Aalbers is involved

First measurement of nuclear recoil from solar neutrinos by XENONnT

XENONnT, a detector built to search for dark matter, today announced the first measurement of nuclear recoils from solar neutrinos.

The sun makes neutrinos in several nuclear reactions. Neutrinos, like dark matter, only very rarely interact with normal matter. Very occasionally, they collide with a nucleus, and the recoil of that nucleus reveals the neutrino.

XENONnT just measured solar neutrinos colliding with nuclei like billiard balls -- 'coherent' and 'elastic' in physics jargon.

Solar neutrinos have not been seen before in this way, and earlier detectors that saw solar neutrinos had to be 10-500x as large as XENONnT. This is because they were not sensitive enough to detect the tiny recoils from coherent elastic collisions, and instead looked for rarer but more obvious neutrino signatures.

A coherent elastic nuclear recoil is exactly the signal we hope to see from dark matter. The fact that XENONnT saw this signal, albeit for neutrinos, beautifully confirms that the detector works.

So now bring on the dark matter particles!

See the website of the XENONnT collaboration or read their press release for more details, or contact xe-pr@lngs.infn.it.

See also the newsitem on the website of Nikhef