Today, Wednesday July 10th, at the International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter (IDM2024) in L’Aquila (IT), the XENON collaboration announced their new results: the first measurement of low-energy nuclear recoils from neutrinos produced in nuclear reactions inside the Sun, particularly those involving the element boron. 

XENONnT is the first experiment to measure coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) from neutrinos produced in the core of the Sun, and in general from a natural neutrino source. CEvNS were discovered only recently, in 2017 with an artificial source of neutrinos at the SNS.

This result confirms the excellent performance of XENONnT In terms of its low-energy threshold and small background, and marks the entrance of a dark matter detector into the so-called “neutrino fog” region, where (at least in this part of the parameter space) neutrinos start to become a relevant background for WIMP search.