The gallium anomaly

Abstract

In order to test the end-to-end operations of gallium solar neutrino experiments, intense electron-capture sources were fabricated to measure the responses of the radiochemical SAGE and GALLEX/GNO detectors to known fluxes of low-energy neutrinos. Such tests were viewed at the time as a cross-check, given the many tests of ⁷¹Ge recovery and counting that had been routinely performed, with excellent results. However, the four ⁵¹Cr and ³⁷Ar source experiments yielded rates below expectations, a result commonly known as the Ga anomaly. As the intensity of the electron-capture sources can be measured to high precision, the neutrino lines they produce are fixed by known atomic and nuclear rates, and the neutrino absorption cross section on ⁷¹Ga is tightly constrained by the lifetime of ⁷¹Ge, no simple explanation for the anomaly has been found. To check these calibration experiments, a dedicated experiment BEST was performed, utilizing a neutrino source of unprecedented intensity and a detector optimized to increase statistics while providing some information on counting rate as a function of distance from the source. The results BEST obtained are consistent with the earlier solar neutrino calibration experiments, and when combined with those measurements, yield a Ga anomaly with a significance of approximately 4$\sigma$, under conservative assumptions. But BEST found no evidence of distance dependence and thus no explicit indication of new physics. In this review we describe the extensive campaigns carried out by SAGE, GALLEX/GNO, and BEST to demonstrate the reliability and precision of their experimental procedures, including ⁷¹Ge recovery, counting, and analysis. We also describe efforts to define uncertainties in the neutrino capture cross section, which now include estimates of effects at the $\lesssim 0.5$% level such as radiative corrections and weak magnetism. With the results from BEST, an anomaly remains even if one retains only the transition to the ⁷¹Ge ground state, whose strength is fixed by the known lifetime of ⁷¹Ge. We then consider the new-physics solution most commonly suggested to resolve the Ga anomaly, oscillations into a sterile fourth neutrino, ${\nu }_e\to {\nu }_s$. We find such a solution generates substantial tension with several null experiments, owing to the large mixing angle required. While this does not exclude such solutions – the sterile sector might include multiple neutrinos as well as new interactions – it shows the need for more experimental constraints, if we are to make progress in resolving the Ga and other low-energy neutrino anomalies. We conclude by consider the role future low-energy electron-capture sources could play in this effort.