English

Development of a method for determining the search window for solar flare neutrinos

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2020-10-12 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Neutrinos generated during solar flares remain elusive. However, after 5050 years of discussion and search, the potential knowledge unleashed by their discovery keeps the search crucial. Neutrinos associated with solar flares provide information on otherwise poorly known particle acceleration mechanisms during solar flare. For neutrino detectors, the separation between atmospheric neutrinos and solar flare neutrinos is technically encumbered by an energy band overlap. To improve differentiation from background neutrinos, we developed a method to determine the temporal search window for neutrino production during solar flares. Our method is based on data recorded by solar satellites, such as Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), and GEOTAIL. In this study, we selected 23 solar flares above the X5.0 class that occurred between 1996 and 2018. We analyzed the light curves of soft X-rays, hard X-rays, γ\gamma-rays, line γ\gamma-rays from neutron capture as well as the derivative of soft X-rays. The average search windows are determined as follows: 4,1784,178 s for soft X-ray, 700700 s for derivative of soft X-ray, 944944 s for hard X-ray (100100-800800 keV), 1,5861,586 s for line γ\gamma-ray from neutron captures, and 776776 s for hard X-ray (above 5050 keV). This method allows neutrino detectors to improve their sensitivity to solar flare neutrinos.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.10715,
  title  = {Development of a method for determining the search window for solar flare neutrinos},
  author = {K. Okamoto and Y. Nakano and S. Masuda and Y. Itow and M. Miyake and T. Terasawa and S. Ito and M. Nakahata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.10715},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

29 pages. Accepted for Solar Physics