Saturday, September 06, 2008

Radioactive Decay Rates tied to Earth-Sun Distance

This is pretty interesting. Some physicists have noticed that radioactive decay rates are not constant, but for some nuclides has a seasonal variation.

From the article:

Another interesting possibility is that terrestrial radioactive nuclei are interacting in a novel way with the neutrino flux Φν emitted from the interior of the Sun. This flux also varies with 1/R2, and the resulting seasonal modulation of Φν has been observed by Super-Kamiokande [16, 17]. This possibility is supported by the data we report in Ref. [18] in which we present evidence for the possible detection of a change in the decay rate of 54Mn during the solar flare of 13 December 2006.

As noted in Ref. [18], the coincidence in time between
the change in the 54Mn counting rate and the solar flare,
along with other observations, is consistent with a mech-
anism based on a change in Φν during the solar flare.


Here's a link to the PDF: http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/0808.3283v1