Neutrino-Induced Decay: A Critical Review of the Arguments

Abstract

There has been scientific debate about speculations that ‘neutrino-induced’ radioactive decay causes apparent violations of the exponential-decay law. Sturrock and others repeatedly publish papers asserting influences by solar and cosmic neutrinos on radioactive decay measurements and therefrom draw conclusions about space science that are highly speculative. Recurrent themes in their work are claims that the solar neutrino flux reveals oscillations at a monthly rate which can be linked to solar rotation, that annual and monthly oscillations occur in radioactive decay rates or directionality of emitted radiation which can be linked to variations in solar and cosmic neutrino flux hitting Earth’s surface, and that unstable radioactivity measurements can be used as a source of information about the interior of the Sun and dark matter. Radionuclide metrologists have extensively investigated and refuted their arguments. Metrological evidence shows that radioactive decay does not violate the exponential-decay law and is not a probe for variations in solar neutrino flux. In this review paper, the main arguments of Sturrock are listed and counterarguments are presented. Reference is made to earlier published work in which the evidence has been scrutinised in detail.

Direct Detection of Dark Matter: A Critical Review

“…Then, a robust modulation analysis must show the consistency of all terms of Equation ( 13), no one excluded at the very least. As a further example, it is also worth mentioning that the literature is full of apparent violations of the exponential law with annual modulation components in radioactive decays, opportunely criticized; see [45] and references therein. Finally, in case of annual modulation, the limit in Figure 2 has a cusp around the minimum (red curve).…”

Generalized Lomb–Scargle analysis of 22 years of super-Kamiokande solar $$^8$$B neutrino data

“…The amplitude of this modulation at a period of 38 days is equal to 6.9%. Most recently, it has been shown that the significance of this peak is due to the fortuitous alignment of six data points [14]. If these data points are excluded, the amplitude gets reduced to 5.3% thereby reducing the significance of the peak.…”

“…Therefore, Ref. [14] has asserted that the aforementioned peak is not real and only a statistical fluctuation. Nevertheless, the only way to resolve this imbroglio is to redo the same procedure with additional data.…”

Ambient humidity, the overlooked influencer of radioactivity measurements

“…Measurements with incomplete uncertainty budgets can lead to misinterpretations of the phenomena under investigation, possibly with fundamental implications in science and policy making [3]. One of the most persistent misunderstandings concerning radionuclide metrology is the assertion that cyclic variations in measured decay rates are caused by space weather phenomena, in particular by neutrinos emitted from the Sun or dark matter [4]. Some authors are adamant in their claims that observed violations of the exponentialdecay law cannot be attributed to environmental conditions in the laboratory [5,6].…”

“…Some authors are adamant in their claims that observed violations of the exponentialdecay law cannot be attributed to environmental conditions in the laboratory [5,6]. However, using historical weather data available on meteorological websites, a link with terrestrial weather could be established for several infamous experiments [1,2,4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”