The luminosity constraint in the era of precision solar physics

Abstract

The luminosity constraint is a very precise relationship linking the power released by the Sun as photons and the solar neutrino fluxes. Such a relation, which is a direct consequence of the physical processes controlling the production and the transport of energy in the solar interior, is of great importance for the studies of solar neutrinos and has a special role for the search of neutrinos from the CNO cycle, whose first detection with a 5σ significance has been recently announced by the Borexino collaboration. Here we revise the luminosity constraint, discussing and validating its underlying hypotheses, in the light of latest solar neutrino and luminosity measurements. We generalize the current formulation of the luminosity constraint relation so that it can be easily used in future analysis of solar neutrino data, and we provide a specific application showing the link between CNO and pp neutrino fluxes.