Method to reduce noise for measurement of 7Be and 8B solar neutrinos on gallium-71
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Gallium solar neutrino experiments have historically used radiochemical counting to determine the event rate. A detector which directly measures the ejected electron and a nuclear de-excitation gamma could reduce background counting rates by way of a double-pulse technique. We find this reduction could be as large as 6 orders of magnitude in a 1.5 ton detector when compared with experiments that allow ground-state transitions. In our process, the detector measures the excited nuclear final state of the germanium after an electron neutrino interacts with gallium nucleus through the charged-current interaction. This results in a loss of approximately 90% of the total neutrino signal, but higher energy processes are less suppressed. The neutrinos resulting from this higher energy selection are predominantly from the 8B and 7Be solar neutrino fluxes. © 2024