Variation in Nuclear Decay Rates as a Possible Predictor of Solar Flares

Details Variation in Nuclear Decay Rates as a Possible Predictor of Solar Flares Variation in Nuclear Decay Rates as a Possible Predictor of Solar Flares

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsh21c..07s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SH21C-07

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

[7519] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Flares, [7538] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Solar Irradiance, [7544] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Stellar Interiors And Dynamo Theory, [7554] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / X-Rays, Gamma Rays, And Neutrinos

Scientific paper

Jenkins and Fischbach (Astroparticle Physics, 31, 407, 2009) have recently found evidence for fluctuations in the decay rates of radioactive isotopes in association with solar flares. Jenkins et al. (Astroparticle Physics, 32, 42, 2010) have also found strong evidence for annual variations in measurements of decay rates acquired at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany. If these claims are confirmed, they pose important questions in particle physics and in solar physics, with the intriguing possibility that such measurements may lead to procedures for predicting the occurrence of some solar flares. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss these questions. The strongest feature of the variability of isotopic decay rates is an annual variation in both BNL and PTB data. The phases of these variations rule out the possibility that they are due either to the annual variation in temperature or to the annual variation in Sun-Earth distance. However, we found some time ago that the solar neutrino flux, as measured at Earth, is influenced not only by the varying Sun-Earth distance, but also by the variation in the heliospheric latitude of the Sun-Earth vector (Sturrock,Walther, and Wheatland, Astrophys. J., 507, 978, 1998). The phases of the annual variation in the BNL and PTB data are consistent with the combined effect of varying Sun-Earth distance and varying heliospheric latitude. This result suggests that the decay rates may be influenced by solar neutrinos. This interpretation would require a revision of neutrino physics. In order to check this hypothesis, it would clearly be desirable to be able to compare decay data with neutrino data. The difficulty is that the decay-rate variations amount to only a few parts in 10,000. This is far too small a fraction to be detectable in neutrino data. However, we have recently found that there is a close association between variations in the solar neutrino flux and variations in solar irradiance. Hence we may, with caution, use irradiance data as a proxy for neutrino data. This has the advantage that irradiance data has been measured several times a day with very high accuracy for over thirty years. We shall present recent results on the comparison of decay data and irradiance data, and comment on possible processes that might explain these associations. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through grant AST-0607572.

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