Improved Predictions of Reactor Antineutrino Spectra
By T. Mueller, D. Lhuillier, M. Fallot, A. Letourneau, S. Cormon, M. Fechner, L. Giot, T. Lasserre, J. Martino, G. Mention and 2 more. 2011
869 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Precise predictions of the antineutrino spectra emitted by nuclear reactors is a key ingredient in measurements of reactor neutrino oscillations as well as in recent applications to the surveillance of power plants in the context of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. We report new calculations including the latest information from nuclear databases and a detailed error budget. The first part of this work is the so-called ab initio approach where the total antineutrino spectrum is built from the sum of all {beta} branches of all fission products predicted by an evolution code. Systematic effects and missing information in nuclear databases lead to final relative uncertainties in the 10-20% range. A prediction of the antineutrino spectrum associated with the fission of {sup 238}U is given based on this ab initio method. For the dominant isotopes we developed a more accurate approach combining information from nuclear databases and reference electron spectra associated with the fission of {sup 235}U, {sup 239}Pu, and {sup 241}Pu, measured at Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in the 1980s. We show how the anchor point of the measured total {beta} spectra can be used to suppress the uncertainty in nuclear databases while taking advantage of all the information they contain. Wemore » provide new reference antineutrino spectra for {sup 235}U, {sup 239}Pu, and {sup 241}Pu isotopes in the 2-8 MeV range. While the shapes of the spectra and their uncertainties are comparable to those of the previous analysis of the ILL data, the normalization is shifted by about +3% on average. In the perspective of the reanalysis of past experiments and direct use of these results by upcoming oscillation experiments, we discuss the various sources of errors and their correlations as well as the corrections induced by off-equilibrium effects.« less
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd8a1660e5ccbeb2406811207eda18972af606cd
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
Citations in the corpus
- Sterile Neutrino Fits to Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Measurements (2012, background): “Recently, a reanalysis of the production cross-section per fission [23, 42, 43] has led to an increase in the predicted reactor flux.”
- Improved measurements of the neutrino mixing angle θ13 with the Double Chooz detector (2014, methodology): “In the previous analysis, the 238U contribution was derived from a calculation [20].”
- From the Trees to the Forest: A Review of Radiative Neutrino Mass Models (2017, result): “When compared to the most recent computation of the expected flux [39, 40], a consistent deficit of a few percent is observed, a set of results known as the “reactor anomaly” [41].”
- Global analysis of neutrino masses, mixings and phases: entering the era of leptonic CP violation searches (2012, methodology): “We shall also comment on the effect of adopting the “new” (or “high”) normalization recently proposed in [33, 34].”
- Evidence of $\theta_{13}$>0 from global neutrino data analysis (2011, methodology): “A final remark is in order, concerning some issues recently raised by a reevaluation of reactor fluxes [18, 19].”
- Updated global analysis of neutrino oscillations in the presence of eV-scale sterile neutrinos (2018, methodology): “Regarding reactor neutrino flux predictions we consider two scenarios: (i) fixed fluxes, where we set the uncertainties on the predicted anti-neutrino fluxes to the values estimated in the original publications [3, 4]; (ii) free fluxes, where the normalizations of the neutrino fluxes from the four m”
- Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos (2019, result): “It originated from a 6% deficit of the observed reactor νe events as compared with the recalculated reactor antineutrino flux of four main fission isotopes 235U, 238U, 239Pu and 241Pu [650, 651] 27, with a significance of about 3σ.”