Reactor antineutrino fluxes – Status and challenges

Abstract

In this contribution we describe the current understanding of reactor antineutrino fluxes and point out some recent developments. This is not intended to be a complete review of this vast topic but merely a selection of observations and remarks, which despite their incompleteness, will highlight the status and the challenges of this field. * pahuber@vt.edu 1 For the sake of brevity we will refer to electron antineutrinos as neutrinos throughout this paper.

Status of light sterile neutrino searches

“…However, the discovery of the 5 MeV excess in the reactor neutrino spectra of the RENO [87], Double Chooz [85], and Daya Bay [86] experiments with respect to the theoretical predictions based on the Huber-Muller fluxes [72,73] raised strong doubts on the Huber-Muller fluxes and their estimated uncertainties (see Refs. [80,200]). Since the reactor antineutrino anomaly [66] follows from the comparison of the experimental reactor neutrino rates with the theoretical predictions based on the Huber-Muller fluxes, an increase of the uncertainties of the Huber-Muller fluxes lowers the statistical significance of the anomaly.…”

Constraining sterile neutrino cosmology with terrestrial oscillation experiments

“…See, for instance, Refs. [119][120][121][122][123][124][125] for more details. We note that, of the reactor experiments we have considered, DANSS, Daya Bay and NEOS ¶ employ a near detector to reduce flux-related systematics; the rest, however, depend on theoretical predictions of the flux.…”

Getting to the Bottom of an Antineutrino Anomaly

“…This result generally demonstrates the validity of recent theoretical studies describing antineutrino-based monitoring of reactor fissile content [29,30] The data suggest slightly better agreement in ðdS j =dF 239 Þ with the Huber-Mueller model above 4 MeV prompt energy than below, emphasizing the possibility of disagreements in the evolution of both the flux and the spectrum. Increased statistics are required in order to investigate the possible isotopic origin of the excess in the observed antineutrino flux from 4-6 MeV prompt energy [1,6,7], a topic discussed recently in the literature [10,28,[31][32][33]. In summary, the evolution of Daya Bay's detected IBD yield and energy spectrum has been measured using 2.2 million IBD candidates detected over 1230 days of data taking.…”