DANSS is a highly segmented 1 m 3 plastic scintillator detector. Its 2500 one meter long scintillator strips have a Gdloaded reflective cover. The DANSS detector is placed under an industrial 3.1 GW th reactor of the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant 350 km NW from Moscow. The distance to the core is varied on-line from 10.7 m to 12.7 m. The reactor building provides about 50 m water-equivalent shielding against the cosmic background. DANSS detects almost 5000 ν e per day at the closest position with the cosmic background less than 3%. The inverse beta decay process is used to detectν e . Sterile neutrinos are searched for assuming the 4ν model (3 active and 1 sterile ν). The exclusion area in the ∆m 2 14 , sin 2 2θ 14 plane is obtained using a ratio of positron energy spectra collected at different distances. Therefore results do not depend on the shape and normalization of the reactorν e spectrum, as well as on the detector efficiency. Results are based on 966 thousand antineutrino events collected at three different distances from the reactor core. The excluded area covers a wide range of the sterile neutrino parameters up to sin 2 2θ 14 < 0.01 in the most sensitive region.Published in the Phys.Lett.B as

The DANSS project is aimed at creating a relatively compact neutrino spectrometer which does not contain any flammable or other dangerous liquids and may therefore be located very close to the core of an industrial power reactor. As a result, it is expected that high neutrino flux would provide about 15,000 IBD interactions per day in the detector with a sensitive volume of 1 m 3 . High segmentation of the plastic scintillator will allow to suppress a background down to a ∼1% level. Numerous tests performed with a simplified pilot prototype DANSSino under a 3 GW th reactor of the Kalinin NPP have demonstrated operability of the chosen design.The DANSS detector surrounded with a composite shield is movable by means of a special lifting gear, varying the distance to the reactor core in a range from 10 m to 12 m. Due to this feature, it could be used not only for the reactor monitoring, but also for fundamental research including short-range neutrino oscillations to the sterile state. Supposing one-year measurement, the sensitivity to the oscillation parameters is expected to reach a level of sin 2 (2θnew) ∼ 5 × 10 −3 with ∆m 2 ⊂ (0.02 − 5.0) eV 2 .

The application of the CdTe Timepix detector for the measurement of the activity of radon progenies ( 214 Po and 218 Po) in the air is briefly described. The result of the background test and the comparison of efficiencies of the CdTe Timepix detector and the Si detector for the detection of radon progenies are presented.