R.T. Kouzes (Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, Wash.): "The fusion mechanism that drives the stellar furnace was long thought to be well understood. Sophisticated computer models have been developed to describe this process, and experimental tests of the model for our sun have been carried out for more than 20 years. The `solar neutrino problem'--the deficiency in the experimentally measured flux of neutrinos produced in the fusion process at the center of the sun compared to model calculations-- has cast some doubt on our understanding of stellar energy generation, weak interaction physics, or both.
"The Soviet American Gallium Experiment (SAGE), a solar neutrino detector collaboration between the Russian Academy of Sciences and United States institutions led by Los Alamos National Laboratory, is located in the Caucasus mountains of southern Russia and has been operational for more than two years. This gallium-based detector, unlike earlier experiments, is sensitive to the low-energy ...
