Exploring the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes with Coherent Neutrino Scattering

Collapsing supermassive stars ($M gtrsim 3 times 10^4 M_{odot}$) at high redshifts can naturally provide seeds and explain the origin of the supermassive black holes observed in the centers of nearly all galaxies. During the collapse of supermassive stars, a burst of non-thermal neutrinos is generated with a luminosity that could greatly exceed that of a conventional core collapse supernova explosion. In this work, we investigate the extent to which the neutrinos produced in these explosions can be observed via coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$ u$NS). Large scale direct dark matter detection experiments provide particularly favorable targets. We find that upcoming $mathcal{O}(100)$ tonne-scale experiments will be sensitive to the collapse of individual supermassive stars at distances as large as $mathcal{O}(10)$ Mpc. While the diffuse background from the cosmic history of these explosions is unlikely to be detectable, it could serve as an additional background hindering the search for dark matter.