New Realization of the Conversion Calculation for Reactor Antineutrino Fluxes

Abstract

Validation of the effective conversion method in the reactor antineutrino flux calculation is examined using the \textit{ab initio} calculation of the electron and antineutrino spectra from the state-of-the-art nuclear database. It turns out that neglecting the shape variation of beta decay branches between the allowed and forbidden transitions would induce significant bias in the total inverse-beta-decay yields and energy spectral distributions. We propose a new realization of the conversion method with both the allowed and forbidden virtual branches, and apply it to both the \textit{simulated} data from the nuclear database and \textit{real} data from the fission measurements at ILL by virtue of statistical properties of the allowed and forbidden decays in the database. Two kinds of dominant uncertainty sources are identified and it turns out that the new realization of the conversion calculation can largely reduce the rate and spectral bias and thus present a reliable prediction of the antineutrino fluxes if accurate beta decay information is available in the high endpoint energy range.

23 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, with new results on uncertainty study, and ILL beta spectrum conversion, to appear in PRD

References in corpus (9)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Sterile neutrino search at NEOS Experiment
• Spectral Structure of Electron Antineutrinos from Nuclear Reactors
• Neutrino Oscillation Studies with Reactors
• Diagnosing the Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly with Global Antineutrino Flux Data
• Conversion of electron spectrum associated with fission into the antineutrino spectrum
• Physics with Reactor Neutrinos
• Nuclear Zemach Moments and Finite-Size Corrections to Allowed Beta Decay
• Re-publication of the data from the BILL magnetic spectrometer: The cumulative $\beta$ spectra of the fission products of ${}^{235}$U, ${}^{239}$Pu, and ${}^{241}$Pu

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos
• Sterile Neutrinos
• First-forbidden transitions in the reactor anomaly
• First-forbidden transitions in the reactor anomaly
• Mapping reactor neutrino spectra from TAO to JUNO
• Improved Measurement of the Evolution of the Reactor Antineutrino Flux and Spectrum at Daya Bay
• First measurements with a new $\beta$-electron detector for spectral shape studies
• Ab initio calculations of reactor antineutrino fluxes with exact lepton wave functions
• Model-Independent Determination of Isotopic Cross Sections per Fission for Reactor Antineutrinos