[Jlab-seminars] Today's Physics Seminar: Donald Jones; Reactor Antineutrinos and the PROSPECT Experiment

[Stephanie Tysor]

Physics Seminar
Donald Jones
Temple University

Reactor Antineutrinos and the PROSPECT Experiment

Abstract:

After the initial discovery of the neutrino by Cowan and Reines at the Savannah River reactor complex, nuclear reactors have played a key role in developing our understanding of neutrinos and the weak interaction. For several decades they were thought to be a well understood source of antineutrinos, but in 2011 a new calculation of the neutrino flux led to a 6% deficit in the measured reactor flux relative to the new calculation. This deficit has been termed the Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly (RAA) with one interpretation of it being that the neutrinos are disappearing via oscillation into a fourth sterile species. Furthermore, several key reactor antineutrino experiments at commercial power reactors have recently measured an excess of events in the 5 MeV prompt energy region of the antineutrino spectrum relative to the calculated spectrum. The PROSPECT short-baseline reactor experiment is designed to perform a precision measurement of the antineutrino spectrum associated with 235-U (the key source of fission antineutrinos at LEU commercial reactors) and probe, to high-significance, sterile neutrino oscillation with mass states in the eV region. PROSPECT operates at a distance of 7m from the compact high-flux isotope reactor (HFIR) at ORNL and consists of a single volume of 6Li-loaded liquid scintillator separated into 154 optically isolated segments. Segmentation provides simple event localization over a range of baselines within the detector and thus supports a reactor-model independent oscillation search through a relative measurement of energy spectra between segments. This talk will discuss the PROSPECT oscillation and spectrum analyses as well as presenting recent results.




Friday, June 7, 2019
11:00am
CEBAF Center Auditorium



Stephanie Tysor
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Physics Division
Hall A Administrative Assistant
(office)757-269-6005<callto:757-269-6005> (fax)757-269-5235<callto:757-269-5235>

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