García-Peris, MÁ orcid.org/0000-0003-1984-4548, Ruiz, G., Kubota, S. et al. (24 more authors) (2025) Opportunities and challenges to study solar neutrinos with a Q-Pix pixel readout. Physical Review D, 112. 092009. ISSN: 2470-0010
Abstract
The study of solar neutrinos presents significant opportunities in astrophysics, nuclear physics, and particle physics. However, the low-energy nature of these neutrinos introduces considerable challenges to isolate them from background events, requiring detectors with low-energy threshold, high spatial and energy resolutions, and low data rate. We present the study of solar neutrinos with a kiloton-scale liquid argon detector located underground, instrumented with a pixel readout using the Q-Pix technology. We explore the potential of using volume fiducialization, directional topological information, light signal coincidence, and pulse-shape discrimination to enhance solar neutrino sensitivity. We find that discriminating neutrino signals below 5 MeV is very difficult. However, we show that these methods are useful for the detection of solar neutrinos when external backgrounds are sufficiently understood and when the detector is built using low-background techniques. When building a workable background model for this study, we identify � background from the cavern walls and from capture of � particles in radon decay chains as both critical to solar neutrino sensitivity and significantly underconstrained by existing measurements. Finally, we highlight that the main advantage of the use of Q-Pix for solar neutrino studies lies in its ability to enable the continuous readout of all low-energy events with minimal data rates and manageable storage for further off-line analyses.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Solar neutrinos; Neutrinos; Multi-purpose particle detectors; Neutrino detection; Time-projection chambers |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
| Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jan 2026 10:08 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2026 10:08 |
| Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1103/xq7l-lv7j |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | American Physical Society (APS) |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Identification Number: | 10.1103/xq7l-lv7j |
| Related URLs: | |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:236775 |
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