Neutral-current background induced by atmospheric neutrinos at large liquid-scintillator detectors: III. Comprehensive prediction for low energy neutrinos

Abstract Atmospheric neutrinos play a vital role in generating irreducible backgrounds in liquid-scintillator (LS) detectors via their neutral-current (NC) interactions with 12 C nuclei. These interactions may affect a wide range of research areas from the MeV to GeV energy range, such as the reactor and geo neutrinos, diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB), dark matter, and nucleon decay searches. In this work, we extend our preceding paper (Cheng et al. in Phys. Rev. D 103(5):053001, 2021), by conducting a first-time systematic exploration of NC backgrounds as low as the MeV region of reactor and geo neutrinos. We utilize up-to-date neutrino generator models from GENIE and NuWro, a TALYS-based nuclear deexcitation package and a GEANT4-based detector simulation toolkit for our complete calculation. Our primary focus is to predict the NC background for experimental searches of inverse-beta-decay signals below the 100 MeV visible energy. In order to have deeper understanding of the characteristics of atmospheric neutrino NC interactions in LS, we investigate the model dependence of NC background predictions by using various data-driven models, including the initial neutrino-nucleon interactions, nuclear ground-state structure, final-state interactions, nuclear deexcitation processes, and secondary interactions of final-state particles.