Abstract
We discuss a possibility that the so-called reactor antineutrino anomaly (RAA), which is a deficit of the ν¯e rates in the reactor experiments in comparison to the theoretical expectations, can at least in part be explained by applying a quantum field-theoretical approach to neutrino oscillations, which in particular predicts a small deviation from the classical inverse-square law at short (but still macroscopic) distances between the neutrino source and detector. An extensive statistical analysis of the current reactor data on the integrated ν¯e event rates vs. baseline is performed to examine this speculation. The obtained results are applied to study another long-standing puzzle—gallium neutrino anomaly (GNA), which is a missing νe flux from 37Ar and 51Cr electron-capture decays as measured by the gallium–germanium solar neutrino detectors GALLEX and SAGE.
Highlights
Nuclear reactors produce a clean and intense flux of electron antineutrinos and are very good sources for experiments in neutrino physics
Rather sophisticated calculations [4,5] yielded a net 3–3.5% upward shift in the predicted spectrum-averaged event rate with respect to the previously expected flux used in the earlier short baseline (SBL) reactor experiments (ILL [6,7,8], SRP [9,10,11,12,13,14], Gösgen [15,16], Krasnoyarsk [17,18,19,20], Rovno [21,22,23,24,25,26], Bugey [27,28,29,30,31,32,33]), as well as in the medium and long baseline (MBL, LBL) experiments Palo Verde [34,35,36,37], CHOOZ [38,39,40], and KamLAND [41,42]
The quantum field theory (QFT) approach to neutrino oscillations predicts that the classical inverse-square law can be violated at short, but possibly macroscopic distances from the neutrino source
Summary
Nuclear reactors produce a clean and intense flux of electron antineutrinos and are very good sources for experiments in neutrino physics. It can be seen from the figure that the theory is in very poor agreement with most of the absolute measurements: on average, only about 94–95% of the emitted antineutrino flux was detected at short and medium baselines and maybe even less at very short baselines (the measurements at L 15 m, where L is the distance between the reactor core and detector). Several exceptions (Nucifer, SRP-II, Palo Verde, CHOOZ) do not formally contradict the general trend within the data uncertainties Both early and new measurements at different baselines indicate either “new physics” or incorrect inputs, Universe 2021, 7, 246 primarily related to the reactor antineutrino flux calculations. That issue is somewhat more speculative and the conclusions are less reliable
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