STANDARD SOLAR MODEL UNCERTAINTIES AND THEIR CORRELATIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE SOLAR-NEUTRINO PROBLEM

We present here an analysis of the theoretical uncertainties associated to the predicted solar neutrino rates for the current gallium, chlorine and water-Cerenkov experiments. We estimate the theoretical rates and their error matrices in three independent solar models (proposed by Bahcall and Pinsonneault, Turck-Chieze and Lopes, and Dar and Shaviv), and compare them to the experimental data. We show that the correlations of the theoretical uncertainties are crucial to assess the statistical significance of the solar neutrino deficit. The implications of a parametrization of the errors in terms of the central temperature of the Sun are also discussed.