Importance of a study of the decay of Ca^(37) to the problem of detecting solar neutrinos

Abstract

Recent theoretical and experimental work has shown that a direct test of the theory of stellar energy generation in main sequence stars is possible by detecting solar neutrinos with the reaction Cl^(37) + ^v_(solar) → A^(37) e^-. In order to relate the counting rate in the proposed experiment to the flux of solar neutrinos (and thus ultimately to parameters describing the interior of the sun), one must know the matrix elements for neutrino capture to all the relevant states in A^(37).

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