νSol: Space-based Neutrion Detection

Understanding our Sun and its interior is a very difficult task because very little makes it directly out of the Sun’s core. The energy we see today was generated ~80,000 years ago and is only now coming to the earth. However, neutrinos penetrate matter almost without interaction and make it to Earth at the speed of light. Since neutrinos interact only weakly they are hard to detect; never-the-less within the last ten years neutrino detectors on Earth have started to reliably detect neutrinos from the fusion reactions in the interior of the Sun and scientists have started to use this information to investigate the Sun’s nuclear furnace. Traditional detectors have masses on the order of kilotons, but we propose something different. We can take advantage of the inverse square scaling of the neutrino flux using a space-based detector. A probe as close as 7 solar radii would have a one thousandfold increase in neutrino flux relative to earth. To measure the neutrinos, we use the neutrino's transmutation of gallium into germanium. This emits an electron and a gamma ray with characteristic timing, and we can use this double pulse to reject backgrounds that earth-based detectors typically have to contend with.