Experimental Parameters for a Reactor Antineutrino Experiment at Very Short Baselines

Abstract

Reactor antineutrinos are used to study neutrino oscillation, search for signatures of non-standard neutrino interactions, and to monitor reactor operation for safeguard applications. The flux and energy spectrum of reactor antineutrinos can be predicted from the decays of the nuclear fission products. A comparison of recent reactor calculations with past measurements at baselines of 10-100m suggests a 5.7% deficit. Precision measurements of reactor antineutrinos at very short baselines O(1-10 m) can be used to probe this anomaly and search for possible oscillations into sterile neutrino species. This paper studies the experimental requirements for a new reactor antineutrino measurement at very short baselines and calculates the sensitivity of various scenarios. We conclude that an experiment at a typical research reactor provides 5σ discovery potential for the favored oscillation parameter space with 3 years of data collection.

22 pages, 18 figures, 4 tables

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Improved Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Search and Energy Spectrum Measurement with the PROSPECT Experiment at HFIR
• The PROSPECT Physics Program
• Limits on Sub-GeV Dark Matter from the PROSPECT Reactor Antineutrino Experiment
• Background Radiation Measurements at High Power Research Reactors
• Prospects for Improved Understanding of Isotopic Reactor Antineutrino Fluxes
• Determining reactor fuel type from continuous antineutrino monitoring
• PROSPECT-II Physics Opportunities
• Active-sterile neutrino mixing constraint using reactor antineutrinos with the ISMRAN set-up
• Final Search for Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillations with the PROSPECT-I Detector at HFIR
• Nonfuel Antineutrino Contributions in the High Flux Isotope Reactor
• Future searches for light sterile neutrinos at nuclear reactors
• Sensitivity to sterile neutrino mixing using reactor antineutrinos
• Prospects for Heavy Neutral Lepton Searches at Short and Medium Baseline Reactor Experiments
• A Sterile Neutrino Search at compact materials irradiation facility