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The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory: Observation of flavor change for solar neutrinos
Author(s) -
McDonald Arthur B.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
annalen der physik
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.009
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1521-3889
pISSN - 0003-3804
DOI - 10.1002/andp.201600031
Subject(s) - neutrino , solar neutrino , physics , solar neutrino problem , standard solar model , solar core , neutrino oscillation , flavor , cosmic neutrino background , particle physics , observatory , lepton , neutrino detector , neutrino astronomy , nuclear physics , astrophysics , electron , chemistry , biochemistry
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment was constructed by an international scientific collaboration primarily to provide a clear determination of whether solar neutrinos change their flavor in transit from the core of the sun to the earth. The detector used 1000 tonnes of heavy water (>99.92% D2O) in an ultra‐clean location 2 km underground in INCO's Creighton mine near Sudbury, Canada to observe two separate reactions of neutrinos on deuterium. The first reaction was sensitive only to electron flavor neutrinos and the second reaction was equally sensitive to all neutrino flavors. The measurements by SNO showed clearly that the hypothesis of no neutrino flavor change was ruled out by more than 5.3 standard deviations. The observation of flavor change for neutrinos implies that they have a non‐zero mass. The measured total flux of active neutrinos from 8 B decay in the sun was found to be in excellent agreement with the predictions of solar model calculations. This paper describes the history and scientific measurements of the SNO experiment.