Method for analyzing electron spectra observed in solar neutrino experiments

Abstract
The normalized spectral ratio (the ratio of the measured electron spectrum to that of the SSM with both spectra normalized to contain the same number of events) is used to study results from electron scattering and deuterium dissociation experiments. It is found to be a very useful tool for measuring the energy-dependent deviation from the SSM and results can be expressed in terms of a single parameter—its slope. The number of events needed to see a positive slope preferred by current data at the 3σ level is about 4000–5000 for electron scattering experiments and about 2000 for deuterium dissociation experiments.