Sensitivity of nEXO to 136Xe charged-current interactions: Background-free searches for solar neutrinos and fermionic dark matter

We study the sensitivity of nEXO to solar neutrino charged-current interactions, ν^e+¹³⁶XeCs_ + e⁻, as well as analogous interactions predicted by models of fermionic dark matter. Due to the recently observed low-lying isomeric states of¹³⁶Cs, these interactions will create a time-delayed coincident signal observable in the scintillation channel. Here we develop a detailed Monte Carlo simulation of scintillation emission, propagation, and detection in the nEXO detector to model these signals under different assumptions about the timing resolution of the photosensor readout. We show this correlated signal can be used to achieve background discrimination on the order of 10⁻⁹, enabling nEXO to make background-free measurements of solar neutrinos above the reaction threshold of 0.668 MeV. We project that nEXO could measure the flux of neutrinos from the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle with a statistical uncertainty of 25%, thus contributing a novel and competitive measurement toward addressing the solar metallicity problem. Additionally, nEXO could measure the mean energy of the⁷Be neutrinos with a precision of σ ≤ 1.5 keV and could determine the survival probability of⁷Be and pep solar ν with precision comparable to the state of the art. These quantities are sensitive to the Sun's core temperature and to nonstandard neutrino interactions, respectively. Furthermore, the strong background suppression would allow nEXO to search for charged-current interactions of fermionic dark matter in the mass range m_χ = 0.668–7 MeV with a sensitivity up to three orders of magnitude better than current limits.^*Also at: University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China.