How high is the neutrino floor?

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In this paper, we compute the contribution to the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering cross section from new physics models in the neutrino sector.

• We use this information to calculate the maximum value of the so-called neutrino floor for direct dark matter detection experiments, which determines when these detectors are sensitive to the neutrino background.
• After including all relevant experimental constraints in different simplified neutrino models, we have found that the neutrino floor can increase by various orders of magnitude in the region of dark matter masses below 10 GeV in the case of scalar mediators, however, this spectacular enhancement is subject to the re-examination of supernovae bounds.
• The increase is approximately a factor of two for vector mediators.