Reactor antineutrino shoulder explained by energy scale nonlinearities?

Abstract

The Daya Bay, Double Chooz and RENO experiments recently observed a significant distortion in their detected reactor antineutrino spectra, being at odds with the current predictions. Although such a result suggests to revisit the current reactor antineutrino spectra modeling, an alternative scenario, which could potentially explain this anomaly, is explored in this letter. Using an appropriate statistical method, a study of the Daya Bay experiment energy scale is performed. While still being in agreement with the γ calibration data and Boron 12 measured spectrum, it is shown that a O(1%) deviation of the energy scale reproduces the distortion observed in the Daya Bay spectrum, remaining within the quoted calibration uncertainties. Potential origins of such a deviation, which challenge the energy calibration of these detectors, are finally discussed.

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• Sterile Neutrinos or Flux Uncertainties? - Status of the Reactor Anti-Neutrino Anomaly
• Stereo neutrino spectrum of 235U fission rejects sterile neutrino hypothesis
• Beta-decay studies for applied and basic nuclear physics
• Sterile Neutrinos and the Global Reactor Antineutrino Dataset
• SoLid: A short baseline reactor neutrino experiment
• First antineutrino energy spectrum from ${}^{235}$U fissions with the STEREO detector at ILL
• Revealing Fine Structure in the Antineutrino Spectra From a Nuclear Reactor
• Mapping reactor neutrino spectra from TAO to JUNO
• Future searches for light sterile neutrinos at nuclear reactors
• Status of Anomalies and Sterile Neutrino Searches at Nuclear Reactors
• Performance of the SoLid electron anti-neutrino detector
• On the role of radiative losses in energy scale of large liquid scintillator and water Cerenkov detectors