  Direct searches for dark matter with large-scale noble liquid detectors have
become sensitive enough to detect the coherent scattering of local neutrinos.
This will become a very challenging background to dark matter discovery in
planned future detectors. For dark matter with mass above 10 GeV, the dominant
neutrino backgrounds on the Earth are atmospheric neutrinos created by cosmic
ray collisions with the atmosphere. In contrast, the Moon has almost no
atmosphere and nearly all cosmic rays incident on the Moon first collide with
the lunar surface, producing a very different neutrino spectrum. In this work
we estimate the total flux and spectrum of neutrinos near the surface of the
Moon. We then use this to show that a large-scale liquid xenon or argon
detector located on the Moon could potentially have significantly greater
sensitivity to dark matter compared to an equivalent detector on the Earth due
to effectively reduced neutrino backgrounds.
