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