Speaker
Richard Bonventre
(University of Pennsylvania)
Description
Solar neutrino experiments have yet to see directly the transition region
between matter-enhanced and vacuum oscillations. The transition region is
particularly sensitive to models of non-standard neutrino interactions and
propagation. We examine several such non-standard models, which predict a
lower-energy transition region and a flatter survival probability for the 8B
solar neutrinos than the standard large-mixing angle (LMA) model. We find that
while some of the non-standard models provide a better fit to the solar
neutrino data set, the large measured value of theta_13 and the size of
the experimental uncertainties lead to a low statistical significance for these
fits. We have also examined whether simple changes to the solar density profile
can lead to a flatter 8B survival probability than the LMA prediction, but
find that this is not the case for reasonable changes. We conclude that the
data in this critical region is still too poor to determine whether any of
these models, or LMA, is the best description of the data.
Primary authors
Anthony LaTorre
(University of Chicago)
Gabriel Orebi Gann
(University of California at Berkeley)
Josh Klein
(University of Pennsylvania)
Olivia Wasalski
(University of British Columbia)
Richard Bonventre
(University of Pennsylvania)
Stanley Seibert
(University of Pennsylvania)
