ABSTRACT
The concept of studying the neutrino radiation from the sun as a technique for exploring the deep interior, and verifying that the sun’s energy source is indeed the thermal fusion of the light nuclei into helium was rarely expressed. The early papers postulating detailed mechanisms for the fusion processes in stars did not include the neutrinos in the beta decay processes, even though the neutrino was conceptually associated with nuclear beta decay. Perhaps it was too obvious to express, or the neutrino was a mysterious particle that was nearly impossible to detect. The principal goal at the time was to account for the lifetime of main sequence stars by thermonuclear processes. Experimentalists in the late 1940’s suggested using the sun and nuclear reactors as intense sources of neutrinos useful for experimental detection of the free neutrino (Paper 1.A.II). The views on the neutrino as a useful particle for observing the sun, the earth’s heat sources and supernovae changed dramatically after the unique experiment of Reines and Cowan[1] the first detection of the antineutrinos from a reactor. After this event a number of detectors were built in the world’s deepest mines to detect cosmic ray produced neutrinos[2, 3] and the high energy physicists built neutrino beams at accelerators to study neutrino physics at high energy[4].
