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In "Research and Development for a Gadolinium Doped Water Cherenkov Detector" the phrase "forward peaking" is used to describe a signal. This comes up in lots of other contexts too, but I still can't work out what's meant by it. The sentence in question is;

"But due to a strong forward peaking of the neutrino-electron elastic scattering cross section, a solar neutrino signal can be extracted from the data using the directionality of the electrons."

Can you define "forward peaking" please?

dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
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Jekowl
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    related: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26507/can-neutrino-detectors-tell-what-direction-the-neutrinos-came-from http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/135162/what-exactly-do-we-see-on-the-famous-neutrino-image-of-the-sun – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jun 20 '15 at 15:14

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It means that when the neutrinos hit electrons, the electrons are moving preferentially in the same directions that the neutrinos were moving. So when we are building a water Cherenkov detector for solar neutrinos, the Cherenkov signal will be coming from the direction of the sun. This is very advantageous to suppress background and because of the daily and annual movement of the sun we can alo suppress other (nondirectional) detector bias effects that could distort a neutrino signal from the sun very effectively.

CuriousOne
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