Neutrino sunshine

Full text: On 10 June 1992, at the Neutrino 92 meeting in Grenada, Spain, Till Kirsten of Heidelberg's Max Planck Institute reported that neutrinos from sunshine had been seen. Most of the energy pumped out by the Sun comes from the fusion of protons into alpha particles, a process which also liberates neutrinos. While it takes about a million years for radiant energy formed in the deep interior of the Sun to fight its way to the surface, the highly penetrating neutrinos emerge almost immediately. It was in 1970 that Ray Davis and his team began taking data with a tank containing 615 tons of perchloroethylene (dry cleaning fluid) 1500 metres underground in the Homestake gold mine, South Dakota. The observed signal is consistently smaller than what is expected. This 'solar neutrino problem' was confirmed by the Kamioka mine experiment in Japan, looking at the Cherenkov light released by neutrino interactions in some 700 tons of water. However these experiments are only sensitive to a tiny high energy tail of the solar neutrino spectrum, and to understand what is going on needs measurements of the primary neutrinos from proton fusion. To get at these neutrinos, two large new detectors, using gallium and sensitive to these lower energy particles, have been built and commissioned in the past few years. The detectors are SAGE ('Soviet' American Gallium Experiment) in the Baksan Neutrino Observatory in the Caucasus, and Gallex, a team from France, Germany, Israel, Italy and the US in the Italian Gran Sasso underground Laboratory. At Grenada, Kirsten reported unmistakable signs of solar neutrinos of proton origin recorded in Gallex. SAGE and Gallex do not yet have enough data to unambiguously fix the level of primary solar neutrinos reaching the Earth, and the interpretation of the interim results tends to be subjective. However after 23 years of conditioning through watching the solar neutrinos' high energy tail, the prospect of a neutrino deficit is taken very seriously, and has led to ideas of neutrino oscillations, and oscillation resonances. If the different neutrino varieties - electron, muon and tau - have a mass, then they can oscillate between themselves. A neutrino beam starting off as pure muon-type, for example, would change its composition as it went along. Setting limits on this behaviour is an important objective in neutrino experiments, with 'long baseline' studies - beams covering a long distance between source and detector, playing a vital role. Lincoln Wolfenstein, one of the architects of the new neutrino oscillation scenarios, says 'it is still not clear whether neutrinos have masses or not'. Laboratory experiments try to measure these masses, but so far only upper Unfits have been established. These studies are beginning to reach the limit of their sensitivity and are unlikely to improve drastically. 'But there is indirect evidence,' says Wolfenstein, 'that neutrinos are much lighter.' The solar neutrino problem is really to solar neutrino opportunity,' he continues. Future experiments with gallium and other new neutrino detection techniques, coupled with new high energy neutrino studies, will answer the question