Speaker
Description
The recent observations of solar $\rm ^8B$ neutrinos via coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering (CEνNS) by the PANDAX-4T and XENONnT collaborations mark the first detection of the so-called “neutrino fog” — an irreducible background for future direct dark matter searches. In this talk, I will show how these results enable powerful new probes of light mediators coupling to neutrinos and quarks. Using the new available datasets from PANDAX-4T and XENONnT, we derive leading constraints on sub-GeV scalar and vector mediators, including scenarios with flavor-universal or mass-proportional quark couplings.
I will also discuss the impact of subdominant neutrino interaction channels — such as neutrino–electron scattering and the Migdal effect — and demonstrate that, while typically neglected, they can contribute non-negligibly in S2-only analyses. These results highlight the potential of next-generation liquid xenon detectors not only for dark matter discovery, but also as sensitive laboratories for light new physics in the neutrino sector.
