Abstract
Measuring the solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales could provide a new window to inform the Solar Standard Model as well as studies of the Earth's long-term climate. We demonstrate the feasibility of measuring the time-evolution of the $^8$B solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales using paleo detectors, naturally occurring minerals which record neutrino-induced recoil tracks over geological times. We explore suitable minerals and identify track lengths of 15--30 nm to be a practical window to detect the $^8$B solar neutrino flux. A collection of ultra-radiopure minerals of different ages, each some 0.1 kg by mass, can be used to probe the rise of the $^8$B solar neutrino flux over the recent gigayear of the Sun's evolution. We also show that models of the solar abundance problem can be distinguished based on the time-integrated tracks induced by the $^8$B solar neutrino flux.
Highlights
The concept of “solar activity” is used by the scientific community to study the fact that the Sun is not a static quiet object and, in contrast to what was thought in ancient times, evolves [1]
We have considered solar standard model (SSM) with two metallicities (GS and AGSS) to study the detectability of the boron-8 (8B) solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales using paleo detectors
Our default setup is a paleo detector composed of a collection of 0.1 kg of sinjarite crystals of different ages, up to 1 Gyr old and aged with 200 Myr resolution, but we consider an older sample reaching 2.5 Gyr with 500 Myr age-dating resolution
Summary
The concept of “solar activity” is used by the scientific community to study the fact that the Sun is not a static quiet object and, in contrast to what was thought in ancient times, evolves [1]. Recent measurements of the solar elemental abundances (metallicity) by Asplund et al (hereafter AGSS) [18] have caused a new conflict within the SSM. Solar models using the new metallicity are no longer able to reproduce helioseismic results, causing the so-called solar abundance problem [6,20]. In the case of paleo detectors, approximately 1-Gyr-old samples are possible, so even a small mass of 10 mg would be competitive with a terrestrial experiment of 103 kg running for 10 years; both have exposures ε 1⁄4 0.01 kg Myr. In this paper, we consider the detectability of solar neutrinos using paleo detectors. Paleo detectors open a new way to search for solar neutrinos, but they allow us to probe the Sun in the past on Gyr timescales, something that is not possible with terrestrial detectors.
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