The Very Low Energy Solar Flux of Electron and Heavy-Flavor Neutrinos and Antineutrinos

Abstract

We calculate the thermal flux of low-energy solar neutrinos and antineutrinos of all flavors arising from a variety of neutrino pair processes: Compton production (including plasmon-pole diagrams), neutral current decay of thermally populated nuclear states, plasmon decay, and electron transitions from free to atomic bound states. The resulting flux density per flavor is significant (10E8-10E9/cm2/sec/MeV) below about 5 keV, and the distributions fill much of the valley between the high-energy edge of the cosmic background neutrino spectrum and the low energy tails of the pp-chain electron neutrino and terrestrial electron antineutrino spectra. Thermal neutrinos carry information on the solar core temperature distribution and on heavy flavor masses in the range of 1 keV. The detection of these neutrinos is a daunting but interesting challenge.