Solar Neutrino Problem

As we all know that nuclear fusion goes on in sun core which in turn emits energy in form of gamma
rays, radiation and neutrinos which reach to earth without any significant loss of energy throughout
their path. Solar neutrino problem is actually discrepancies in the measurements of actual solar neutrino
types and what the Sun's interior models predict.

Standard model: - A neutrino is a particle which is believed to have no mass and travels at the speed of
light. Neutrinos are produced in the cores of stars like the Sun as a byproduct of nuclear fusion. They
interact only weakly with matter, and speed out of the core of the star essentially unimpeded. This
means that the type of neutrino would be fixed when it was produced.

Observations: - In various experiments, the number of detected neutrinos was between 1/3 and 1/2 of
the predicted number. Therefore either the current models of the sun were wrong or the models of
neutrino behavior were wrong. The problem was troubling because it meant that General Relativity was
incorrect, models of stellar evolution were incorrect, or the "standard model of physics" was incorrect.
Since each of these models had proven remarkably accurate, the choice was an unpalatable one.

Solution: - The temperatures and pressures in the interiors of sun were very different from those
predicted. For example, since neutrinos measure the amount of current nuclear fusion, it was suggested
that the nuclear processes in the core of the sun might have temporarily shut down. Since it takes
thousands of years for heat energy to move from the core to the surface of the sun, this would not
immediately be apparent. Then a new branch helioseismology, the study of how waves propagate
through the sun gave some answers. Based on such observations it became possible to measure the
interior temperatures of the sun which agreed with the standard model. Instead of the old model of
vertical convection, horizontal jet streams were found in the top layer of the convective zone. Small
ones were found around each pole and larger ones extended to the equator. As might be expected,
these had different velocities.

Currently, the solar neutrino problem is believed to have resulted from an inadequate understanding of
the properties of neutrinos. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, there are three
different kinds of neutrinos: electron-neutrinos (which are the ones produced in the sun and the ones
detected by the above-mentioned experiments), muon-neutrinos, and tau-neutrinos. Earlier it was
widely believed that neutrinos were massless and their types were invariant. However, theoreticians in
the 1980s realized that if neutrinos had mass then they could change from one type to another. Thus
the "missing" solar neutrinos could be electron-neutrinos which changed into other types along the way
to Earth and therefore escaped detection.

LIGO( Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)

LIGO is a large physics experiment which is attempting to directly detect gravitational waves. Cofounded
in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project
between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities.
These waves were first predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1916, when the technology
necessary for their detection did not yet exist.

Principle: - Detection of gravitational waves is done by a principle based on Michelson interferometer.

The primary interferometer at each site consists of mirrors suspended at each of the corners of the L; it
is known as a power-recycled Michelson interferometer with Fabry–Pérot arms. Light from a laser is split
by a partially reflective surface, and sent along two perpendicular paths. At the end of each path, they
hit a mirror that sends them back to the original beam splitter, where they are recombined and sent to a
detector. The amount of light reaching the detector depends on the relative length of the two paths. If
the lengths are exactly the same, the light from the two arms will be exactly in phase (peaks lining up
with peaks, etc.) and all of the input light will reach the detector; if one path is half a wavelength of light
longer than the other (round trip), the waves from the two arms will be out of phase, and no light will
reach the detector.

Application:- A gravitational wave coming along will cause space to stretch and compress slightly along
the direction of the wave, which will cause one of the arms to get a little bit longer, and a little bit
shorter. This should show up as a small fluctuation in the intensity of the light reaching the detector,
which can be analyzed to give the strength, frequency, and direction of propagation of the wave.

Problem and solution:- Light that does not contain a signal is returned to the interferometer using a
power recycling mirror, thus increasing the power of the light in the arms. In actual operation, noise
sources can cause movement in the optics which produces similar effects to real gravitational wave
signals. Observations are compared from both sites to reduce the effects of noise.

Observation:- On August 12, 2010, the first discovery made using only home-computer collaboration
through LIGO and GEO 600 is announced in a scientific publication. This was not a detection of
gravitational waves, but rather the discovery of a radio pulsar using BOINC-based LIGO data analysis
tools on data from radio telescopes rather than data from LIGO interferometers.

Submitted by

Aman Raj Verma

Aerospace(6th semester)

SC08B002