Borexino legacy paper
Gianpaolo Bellini (Borexino spokesperson) celebrating in 2007 with the Borexino collaboration start of data taking.
Credits: Borexino
In the journal “Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Physics” a review article has been published online on the legacy, both technical and scientific, of Borexino, entitled “Technological novelties and scientific discoveries with the Borexino experiment”.
Borexino succeeded for the first time to measure the entire energy spectrum of neutrinos that the Sun produces exploiting techniques that allowed to obtain unprecedented levels of radiopurity, which as of today represent the state-of-the-art. Experiments currently underway or in preparation, such as those studying rare events (dark matter direct detection, neutrinoless double beta decay, reactor neutrinos) use technologies that largely derive from Borexino.
Borexino definitively helped answering Humanity’s age-old question about how the Sun and stars shine. This is a historic result that has been expected for more than eighty-five years when, in late 1930s, Hans Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker hypothesized what Borexino has now confirmed for the first time: stars are producing energy by the so-called pp-chain and CNO bi-cycle processes.
Inside view of the Borexino detector. Credits: Borexino
Further information:
- Borexino website: https://borex.lngs.infn.it/
- G. Bellini, Technological novelties and scientific discoveries with the Borexino experiment, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nucl-102622-021701
- APPEC news: Borexino performs the first detection ever of CNO cycle neutrinos from the Sun