Superkamiokande and solar antineutrinos

Abstract

We propose to exploit the angular distribution of the positrons emitted in the inverse beta decay to extract a possible antineutrino signal from the Superkamiokande background. From the statistics collected in just 101.9 days one obtains a model independent upper bound on the antineutrino flux (for energy greater than 8.3 MeV) Phi < 9*10^4 cm^-2 s^-1 at the 95% C.L. By assuming the same energy spectrum as for the 8B neutrinos, the 95% C.L. bound is Phi < 6*10^4 cm^-2 s^-1. Within three years of data taking, the sensitivity to neutrino-antineutrino transition probability will reach the 1% level, thus providing a stringent test of hybrid oscillation models.

7 pages, 1 figure, Latex