“This observation of low-energy solar neutrinos demonstrates how advances driven by the search for dark matter are opening entirely new windows on the universe,” said Elena Aprile, Professor at Columbia University and spokesperson of the XENON Collaboration. “It shows that technologies originally developed to observe some of the rarest interactions in nature are now enabling us to explore fundamental questions well beyond their original scientific goals.”
Says the Weizmann Institute’s Budnik, who, alongside his research role, serves on the collaboration’s editorial board: “This measurement is, on the one hand, an opportunity that arose from the exceptional sensitivity and extremely low backgrounds we achieved in our search for dark matter. At the same time, however, the physics of rare events, including neutrinos, is increasingly becoming for us a scientific target in its own right, with fascinating results like the ones we are presenting now and more still to come.
“We have entered an era in which we can see things that were previously beyond our reach, and it is always fascinating to discover what is waiting for us there – whether it is what we expected to find or, even more intriguingly, something we did not expect at all.”
