ABSTRACT
Mikheyev and Smirnov, following Wolfenstein’s theory of neutrino oscillations in the presence of matter, have found that the change of flavour of solar neutrinos may be spectacularly enhanced in the presence of solar matter, when the parameters of the neutrino mass operator fall in a suitable range (MSW effect). It is shown that this effect can be readily deduced from the adiabatic solution of the equation of flavour evolution. A complete study of the two-flavour case is given, permitting to calculate, for any set of values of the mass operator parameters, the ve suppression factor at the site of detection on earth. The adiabatic approximation holds over a wide range of the parameters, leading to especially simple expressions. Our calculations cover the whole range, including domains where the adiabatic approximation is no longer valid. Some of the results, presented in a form most suited for an analysis of solar neutrino experiments, are displayed for illustration and discussed.
