[ExI] decay rate correlated with the sun?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc
Subject: Re: [ExI] decay rate correlated with the sun?

John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>> I hope my skepticism will turn out to be undeserved, Physics needs a good
surprise.


>...I sympathise with the sentiment, but I think that the detectors are much
more likely to be the things being affected than the decay events
themselves.  Much, much, much more likely.  Ben Zaiboc

_______________________________________________

Ben that's what I concluded too, but I will be damned if I can think of a
mechanism which would cause a detector to occasionally read false positives
as a function of a neutrino interaction.  If the neutrinos really are
somehow causing extra decays, we would expect to see the variation
proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the sun.  If that's
the case, it would be easy to detect the slow decays in space probes.  If
there is some mysterious mechanism that accounts for 10% of fission events,
then that 10% variation would be proportional to neutrino flux, which would
also be easy to see in space probes.

Since we don't see this, I dismiss the notion that neutrinos can somehow
have some effect on the electro-weak force, but that still leaves a puzzle,
why or how neutrinos can affect detectors.

Wild notion: the temperature of the detector somehow affects the
scintillation threshold, and the instruments are slightly warmer in the
summer than in the winter?

spike