"Physical Review Letters": the article by Professor Giora Shabiv from the Technion - among the 20 most important articles in physics in the last 50 years
The scientific journal "Physical Review Letters" chose an article written by Professor Giora Shabib from the Faculty of Physics at the Technion in 1968, as one of the twenty most important articles in physics published by him in the last fifty years. "Physical Review Letters" is the most important journal in the field of physics and Professor Shabib is the only Israeli appearing on the prestigious list.
The article was written with Prof. John Bachel who was at Caltech at the time. Professor Giora Shabib was at Cornell at the time. Physical Review Letters has selected the twenty articles to mark its 50th anniversary. The article discusses the neutrino experiment of Professor Ray Davies. In 1968, the first results from this experiment were obtained. The neutrino is a tiny particle that is released in the nuclear reactions that occur in the core of the sun and is responsible for the release of nuclear energy in the core of the sun. This is the energy that the sun ultimately radiates into space and the earth. The neutrino is a particle with special properties, the most important of which is its ability to penetrate through the sun and reach the earth. The idea was, therefore, to build an experiment that would succeed in discovering a number of such particles and confirm in a direct experiment that the sun produces energy by nuclear reactions. The experiment itself was conducted in a deep mine in Dakota and included a huge tank of one hundred thousand liters of liquid with which the neutrino was supposed to react (in total barely one reaction per day).
At the same time, Professor Shabib made a long series of calculations with the aim of: (a) predicting the results of the experiment according to what was known at the time about the structure of the sun. (b) draw conclusions about the current internal composition of the sun. (c) draw conclusions about the initial composition of the sun. These calculations were the basis for the analysis of the experiment by Bhakkel and Shabib.
The result of the experiment was an upper barrier to the flux of neutrinos from the sun, meaning that the flux was significantly lower than the prediction of Shaviv and Behkel, which was based on their knowledge at the time of the properties of neutrinos and the physics of elementary particles and their knowledge of the structure of the sun and its evolution from its creation to the present day.
The analysis of the experimental results by Bhakkel and Shabib showed that the initial amount of helium in the Sun was consistent with the prediction of the Big Bang, which confirmed the theory of star formation. The analysis also showed that since the theory of star formation is largely confirmed, the explanation for the experimental result must lie in the unknown physics of neutrinos. The article by Behkel and Shabib, therefore, predicted that the theory of the neutrino must be changed. Shabiv and Behkel pointed out in the article that certain details in the structure of the sun have zero effect on the release of the sun's energy but have a considerable effect on the flux of neutrinos and they (the details) are not known with the required precision.
The result of the experiment caused a stir in the world of physics and astrophysics. Over 10,000 articles were written on the subject in which every possible corner of the theory was tested and among other things, hypotheses were raised that the sun might not produce its energy in nuclear reactions - which was already considered self-evident at the time. At the same time, several new experiments were conducted at a total cost of about 250 million dollars with the aim of discovering the nitrites from the sun.
35 years later it became clear that the neutrino changes its identity on the way from the sun to the earth. Only when an experiment was conducted which was able to discover the neutrino in its second identity, the mystery was solved almost definitively and the theoretical result matched the experiment.
Some of the researchers (Dois and the Japanese group) won the Nobel Prize for discovering the neutrino in its primary identity, but not those who discovered the neutrino in its second identity - the Canadian group.
