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Cool Sun Models

There are a number of ways to analyze these possibilities. Many of the nonstandard models manifest themselves for neutrino production by leading to a cooler solar core.gif This may ultimately be due to changes in the metallicity, the opacities, or the nuclear cross sections. The fluxes of high energy neutrinos are especially sensitive to the core temperature, mainly because of the energy dependence of the cross sections. We have carried out an analysis to see whether the data can be described by a lower temperature [48] -- [50]. We start by assuming the Bahcall-Ulrich estimates [46] of the temperature dependence of the and fluxes, namely and , where is the temperature of the solar core in units of the SSM prediction, K. For small deviations from the standard model is predicted to vary as , i.e., the pp rate increases. This is necessary to maintain constant, where is the solar luminosity. However, we will be using the power laws to describe larger departures from the standard solar model than the usual estimates, so instead we choose so that the luminosity is constant. I.e., one knows that the basic energy mechanism is the conversion

 

Assuming that the sun is quasi-static, the overall luminosity tells us the total energy generation rate, and this in turn puts a constraint on the total neutrino fluxes, namely

 

where the coefficients correct for the neutrino energies. We will use this to constraingif . One then has

   

where R is the rate and is the temperature, both relative to the standard solar model prediction. The additional uncertainties in the formulas are from nuclear cross sections, for the production rates within the sun and for the detector cross sections, which have to be properly correlated between experiments. ``Small'' represents the contributions of minor flux components (pep and CNO). The results are insensitive to how these are treated. It is apparent that it is impossible to describe the data for any value of . The best fit is nominally , but it has a terrible of for 2 df, which is excluded at 99.96% cl. The problem is that the different experiments require different temperatures, namely , and for Kamiokande, Homestake, and the combined gallium results, respectively.

The specific power laws, taken from Bahcall and Ulrich [46], were based on the standard solar model, while here we are extrapolating to nonstandard models. In fact one obtains equally strong conclusions for essentially any temperature exponents, provided only that the neutrinos are more temperature sensitive than the neutrinos. Since the neutrinos are made first, this is certainly a reasonable assumption. One finds similar conclusions even if the error is increased significantly. In fact, the conclusion is strengthened if there is a smaller , because the Kamiokande rate is then in better agreement with the SSM, leaving less room to vary the temperature to account for the chlorine experiment. Thus, it seems that the cool sun models are not an explanation of the data.

One can generalize to more general fits, in which not only the core temperature but the nuclear cross sections are allowed to vary. For example, Dearborn, Shi, and Schramm [14] have considered the case in which , , and are all free parameters ( is proportional to ). Again, they come to the conclusion that one cannot account for the data within reasonable ranges for these parameters.



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Next: Model Independent Analysis Up: Astrophysical Solutions Previous: Astrophysical Solutions




Mon Nov 27 19:39:39 EST 1995