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Session D1 - Divisional Colloquia on Nuclear and Particle Astrophsics.
INVITED session, Thursday evening, May 02
500 Ballroom,
What began 25 years ago as an effort to verify an astrophysical prediction, the flux of neutrinos from the sun, has turned into a major surprise in physics. When Ray Davis initially reported from his Cl-Ar radiochemical experiment in the Homestake gold mine that the flux of ^8B neutrinos from the ``PP-III'' chain of hydrogen burning was as much as a factor of 3 below expectations, it was easy to dismiss it as an astrophysics or nuclear-physics error, or even an experimental error. Now, results of still-improving precision from the Kamiokande water \vCerenkov detector and the SAGE and Gallex gallium radiochemical detectors are also in hand. We will argue that there is, at a modest but interesting level of confidence, no combination of neutrino fluxes from light-element fusion that can fit the data, without introducing either new neutrino physics (oscillations and mass) or significant errors in at least two experiments. Large-scale experiments (SNO and SuperKamiokande) that can check the neutrino-oscillation hypothesis are nearing completion.
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