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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2005.12829,
title = {Sensitivity to neutrinos from the solar CNO cycle in Borexino},
author = {M. Agostini and K. Altenmüller and S. Appel and V. Atroshchenko and Z. Bagdasarian and D. Basilico and G. Bellini and J. Benziger and R. Biondi and D. Bravo and B. Caccianiga and F. Calaprice and A. Caminata and P. Cavalcante and A. Chepurnov and D. D'Angelo and S. Davini and A. Derbin and A. Di Giacinto and V. Di Marcello and X. F. Ding and A. Di Ludovico and L. Di Noto and I. Drachnev and A. Formozov and D. Franco and C. Galbiati and C. Ghiano and M. Giammarchi and A. Goretti and A. S. Göttel and M. Gromov and D. Guffanti and Aldo Ianni and Andrea Ianni and A. Jany and D. Jeschke and V. Kobychev and G. Korga and S. Kumaran and M. Laubenstein and E. Litvinovich and P. Lombardi and I. Lomskaya and L. Ludhova and G. Lukyanchenko and L. Lukyanchenko and I. Machulin and J. Martyn and E. Meroni and M. Meyer and L. Miramonti and M. Misiaszek and V. Muratova and B. Neumair and M. Nieslony and R. Nugmanov and L. Oberauer and V. Orekhov and F. Ortica and M. Pallavicini and L. Papp and Ö. Penek and L. Pietrofaccia and N. Pilipenko and A. Pocar and G. Raikov and M. T. Ranalli and G. Ranucci and A. Razeto and A. Re and M. Redchuk and A. Romani and N. Rossi and S. Schönert and D. Semenov and G. Settanta and M. Skorokhvatov and O. Smirnov and A. Sotnikov and Y. Suvorov and R. Tartaglia and G. Testera and J. Thurn and E. Unzhakov and F. L. Villante and A. Vishneva and R. B. Vogelaar and F. von Feilitzsch and M. Wojcik and M. Wurm and S. Zavatarelli and K. Zuber and G. Zuzel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.12829},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
16 pages, 12 figures