First Solar Neutrino Results from SNO

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) is a water Cerenkov detector designed to study solar neutrinos. Using 1 kiloton of heavy water as the target and detection medium, SNO is able to separately determine the flux of electron neutrinos and the flux of all active neutrinos from the Sun by measuring the rate of charged and neutral current reactions in the D2O. A comparison of these interaction rates allows for a direct observation of solar neutrino oscillations. SNO also measures the rate of neutrino-electron elastic scattering, which allows for comparison to previous water Cerenkov experiments. SNO has excellent sensitivity to electron neutrino energy through the charged current interaction, providing a measure of the 8B spectrum to look for MSW-induced distortions. SNO has been taking production data since November 1999. In this talk, I present the first solar neutrino results from 241 live days of data at SNO and discuss the future prospects for the experiment.
hep group
Last modified: Mon Jun 18 17:13:07 EDT 2001