Gallium's Missing Quarter: The Calibration Defect and Its Sterile Door, Priced

Take a tank of gallium, put the strongest man-made neutrino source you can build at its heart, count the atoms it transmutes, and compare the count with the count your own calibration says must be there. For thirty years, in three laboratories, with two different source isotopes, the count has come up short by about a fifth — a missing quarter, near enough, of every batch of events the calibration promised. The Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions (BEST, 2021) built an apparatus for this one question, with two nested gallium volumes around a single 3.414-megacurie chromium-51 source, and counted a ratio of measured to expected events of 0.79 ± 0.05 in the inner volume and 0.77 ± 0.05 in the outer — twenty-one and twenty-three percent missing, at the two distances alike. Combined with the earlier GALLEX and SAGE calibrations, and depending on which published cross-section evaluation is spent, the deficit stands between roughly four and six and a half sigma; on the standard evaluations it stands above five. This paper prices the three doors that could pay for the missing quarter: a sterile neutrino, which must mix so strongly that reactor experiments, tritium beta decay, solar neutrinos, and the cosmic microwave background have each fenced off most of the ground it needs; a nuclear cross-section error, which must be twenty percent in a number whose largest uncertain piece is five percent — except at one newly opened seam, where the textbook step from the measured germanium lifetime to the capture cross section is itself under challenge; and a miscounted source, which must be wrong by more than a hundred times its own stated uncertainty. Every door carries its price in print. The sterile door is the one the record squeezes hardest. Grade: DEFECT STANDS — PRICED; STERILE DOOR SQUEEZED HARDEST. This paper stands outside my work on the vacuum catastrophe; it draws nothing from that work and repairs nothing in it, and it touches no claim of that program.