Prospects for measuring time variation of astrophysical neutrino sources at dark matter detectors

We study the prospects for measuring the time variation of solar and atmospheric neutrino fluxes at future large-scale Xenon and Argon dark matter detectors. For solar neutrinos, a yearly time variation arises from the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, and, for charged current interactions, from a smaller energy-dependent day-night variation to due flavor regeneration as neutrinos travel through the Earth. For a 100-ton Xenon detector running for 10 years with a Xenon-136 fraction of $\lesssim 0.1\%$, in the electron recoil channel a time-variation amplitude of about 0.8\% is detectable with a power of 90\% and the level of significance of 10\%. This is sufficient to detect time variation due to eccentricity, which has amplitude of $\sim 3\%$. In the nuclear recoil channel, the detectable amplitude is about 10\% under current detector resolution and efficiency conditions, and this generally reduces to about 1\% for improved detector resolution and efficiency, the latter of which is sufficient to detect time variation due to eccentricity. Our analysis assumes both known and unknown periods. We provide scalings to determine the sensitivity to an arbitrary time-varying amplitude as a function of detector parameters. Identifying the time variation of the neutrino fluxes will be important for distinguishing neutrinos from dark matter signals and other detector-related backgrounds, and extracting properties of neutrinos that can be uniquely studied in dark matter experiments.