Systematic Uncertainties in the Analysis of the Reactor Neutrino Anomaly

By A. Hayes, J. Friar, G. Garvey, G. Jungman, G. Jonkmans. 2013

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine uncertainties in the analysis of the reactor neutrino anomaly, wherein it is suggested that only about 94% of the emitted antineutrino flux was detected in short baseline experiments. We find that the form of the corrections that lead to the anomaly are very uncertain for the 30% of the flux that arises from forbidden decays. This uncertainty was estimated in four ways, is as large as the size of the anomaly, and is unlikely to be reduced without accurate direct measurements of the antineutrino flux. Given the present lack of detailed knowledge of the structure of the forbidden transitions, it is not possible to convert the measured aggregate fission beta spectra to antineutrino spectra to the accuracy needed to infer an anomaly. Neutrino physics conclusions based on the original anomaly need to be revisited, as do oscillation analyses that assumed that the antineutrino flux is known to better than approximately 4%.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eacadf2ad5a341a9f23a4b8ec0afcc5f8800570e

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Citations in the corpus

• JUNO physics and detector (2021, methodology): “One is based on the summation method [26, 27, 28] which sums all the antineutrino energy spectra corresponding to thousands of beta decay branches for about 1000 isotopes in the fission products, utilizing information in nuclear databases.”
• A Proposal for a Three Detector Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Program in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam (2015, background): “Moreover, some lack of knowledge of the reactor neutrino fluxes is still remaining and a detailed treatment of forbidden transitions in the reactor spectra computation may result in a few percent increase of systematic uncertainties [26].”
• Improved measurements of the neutrino mixing angle θ13 with the Double Chooz detector (2014, background): “transitions have some impact on the neutrino spectrum [17], but this is under investigation.”
• The impact of individual nuclear properties on $r$-process nucleosynthesis (2015, background): “34]. They will become more neutron rich with the inclusion of new physics, such as sterile neutrino [135, 136] of the type that is suggested by LSND [137], MiniBooNE [138] and reactor neutron anomaly [139]. Independently of new physics, the neutrino driven wind site deserves more study, as the theor”