NBIA Astroparticle Seminar: Wick Haxton

The solar neutrino problem and its resolution — the discovery of neutrino mass and flavor mixing — stand as one of the original examples of multi-messenger astrophysics. The Sun’s physical parameters, its photospheric abundances, its photon and weak luminosities, and its helioseismology so constrained the standard solar model that new physics was required to explain the pattern of neutrino fluxes. That new physics — including the MSW effect -- provides our only constraint on the ordering of the neutrino mass eigenstates. I’ll review this success, as well as two remaining challenges, resolving the solar metallicity problem and demonstrating the equivalence of the Sun’s electromagnetic and weak luminosities. I will discuss the possibility that our Sun can teach us important physics of general importance for the study of stars with planetary systems.