On the Size of the Dark Side of the Solar Neutrino Parameter Space

Abstract

We present an analysis of the MSW neutrino oscillation solutions of the solar neutrino problem in the framework of two-neutrino mixing in the enlarged parameter space $(\Delta m^2,{\tan }^2\theta )$ with $\theta \in (0,\frac{\pi }{2})$. Recently, it was pointed out that the allowed region of parameters from a fit to the measured total rates can extend to values $\theta \ge \frac{\pi }{4}$ (the so called ``dark side'') when higher confidence levels are allowed. The purpose of this letter is to reanalize the problem including all the solar neutrino data available, to discuss the dependence on the statistical criteria in the determination of the CL of the ``dark side'' and to extract the corresponding limits on the largest mixing allowed by the data. Our results show that when the Super-Kamiokande data on the zenith angle distribution of events and the spectrum information is included, the regions extend more into the dark side.

Comments: 5 pages,latex file using RevTex. Two-layer aproximation for the Earth density replaced by numerical integration with PREM. Latest parametrization of the sun matter density (BP2000) is included. Misprints corrected. Conclusions unchanged. 5 postscript figures (bitmapped for compression). A full version of the paper can be found at http://ific.uv.es/~penya/papers/ To appear in Phys. Rev. D