Do hep neutrinos affect the solar neutrino energy spectrum?

Abstract

If the low energy cross section for 3He + p goes to 4He + e + nu_e, the `hep' reaction, is > 20 times larger than the best (but uncertain) theoretical estimates, then this reaction could significantly influence the electron energy spectrum produced by solar neutrino interactions and measured in the SuperKamiokande, SNO, and ICARUS experiments. We compare predicted energy spectra for different assumed hep fluxes and different neutrino oscillation scenarios with the observed SuperKamiokande spectrum. The spectra with enhanced hep contributions provide better fits to the SuperKamiokande data.

Comments: Accepted Phyics Letters B. Related information at http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb . LaTeX file. 12 pages including 2 figures. Typo in Table 2 corrected