Abstract

Future dark matter (DM) direct detection searches will be subject to irreducible neutrino backgrounds that will challenge the identification of an actual WIMP signal in experiments without directionality sensitivity. We study the impact of neutrino-quark non-standard interactions (NSI) on this background, assuming the constraints from neutrino oscillations and the recent COHERENT experiment data, which are relevant for NSI mediated by light mediators, m(med) less than or similar to O(GeV). We calculate the expected number of neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering events in a Xe-based ton-size dark matter detector, including solar neutrino fiuxes from the pp chain and CNO cycle as well as sub-GeV atmospheric fiuxes and taking into account NSI effects in both propagation and detection. We find that sizable deviations from the standard model expectation are possible, but are more pronounced for fiavor-diagonal couplings, in particular for electron neutrinos. We show that neutrino NSI can enhance or deplete the neutrino-nucleus event rate, which may impact DM searches in multi-ton detectors.