The reactor antineutrino anomaly

By G. Mention, D. Lhuillier, M. Cribier, T. Lasserre, M. Fechner, A. Letourneau, T. Mueller. 2011

1,129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, new reactor antineutrino spectra have been provided for 235U, 239Pu, 241Pu, and 238U, increasing the mean flux by about 3 percent. To a good approximation, this reevaluation applies to all reactor neutrino experiments. The synthesis of published experiments at reactor-detector distances below 100 m leads to a ratio of observed event rate to predicted rate of 0.976 ± 0.024. With our new flux evaluation, this ratio shifts to 0.943 ± 0.023, leading to a deviation from unity at 98.6% C.L. which we call the reactor antineutrino anomaly. The compatibility of our results with the existence of a fourth non-standard neutrino state driving neutrino oscillations at short distances is discussed. The combined analysis of reactor data, gallium solar neutrino calibration experiments, and MiniBooNE-ν data disfavors the no-oscillation hypothesis at 99.8% C.L. The oscillation parameters are such that |Δm2new| > 1.5 eV2 (95%) and sin2(2θnew) = 0.14 ± 0.08 (95%).

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86eb9448efe149daa98d71369e247769c2894166

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. M. Maltoni
2. M. Tórtola
3. Y. Farzan
4. T. Schwetz
5. S. Pastor
6. Julien Lesgourgues
7. Stefano Gariazzo
8. C. Giunti

Citations in the corpus

• Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case (2019, background): “After the discovery of the gallium [54]3 and reactor [56] anomalies, more experimental efforts were planned to study more carefully the problem and obtain a final conclusion.”
• Challenges in Double Beta Decay (2013, background): “Few experimental results cannot be accommodated in this framework: the LSND anomaly [21] (further investigated by MiniBooNE [22]) as well as a possible neutrino deficit observed in reactor [23] and Gallium measurements with very intense (Mci) radioactive neutrino sources [24].”
• A Proposal for a Three Detector Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Program in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam (2015, neutral): “Two distinct classes of anomalies pointing at additional physics beyond the Standard Model in the neutrino sector have been reported, namely a) the apparent disappearance signal in low energy electron anti-neutrinos from nuclear reactors beyond the expected θ13 effect [16] (the “reactor anomaly”) an”
• Origin of the heaviest elements: The rapid neutron-capture process (2019, methodology): “Active-sterile transformations, involving sterile neutrinos on the eV mass scale, as suggested by the reactor (Mention et al., 2011) and Gallium (Giunti et al.”