Double Chooz: Results and Perspectives

Abstract

The Double Chooz experiment has been observing ν¯e from two reactor cores at the Chooz nuclear power station in Ardennes, France, with a single 10.3 m3 fiducial volume Gd-doped liquid scintillator detector at a flux-weighted average baseline of ∼1050 m. This article reviews results achieved with a detector live time of 227.93 days and exposure of 33.71 GW-ton-years. A total of 8,249 candidate ν¯e events have been observed, compared to an expected 8,937 events in the null-oscillation case: this deficit is interpreted as evidence for ν¯e disappearance. A fit to the observed neutrino rate and spectral shape gives a best-fit value of sin2(2θ13)=0.109±0.030(stat.)±0.025(syst.) at a mass-squared splitting of Δm312=2.32×10−3 eV2. The null-oscillation hypothesis is excluded by the data at 99.8% CL (2.9σ). The Double Chooz Near Detector is under construction, and analysis efforts to measure neutrino directionality, test Lorentz violation, and measure backgrounds in situ are underway.