Abstract
We review the status and the results of reactor neutrino experiments. Short-baseline experiments have provided the measurement of the reactor neutrino spectrum, and their interest has been recently revived by the discovery of the reactor antineutrino anomaly, a discrepancy between the reactor neutrino flux state of the art prediction and the measurements at baselines shorter than one kilometer. Middle and long-baseline oscillation experiments at Daya Bay, Double Chooz, and RENO provided very recently the most precise determination of the neutrino mixing angleθ13. This paper provides an overview of the upcoming experiments and of the projects under development, including the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy and the possible use of neutrinos for society, for nonproliferation of nuclear materials, and geophysics.
Highlights
80 Years of Reactor Neutrino PhysicsInvented by Pauli [1] in 1930, named by Amaldi in 1934, and later modeled in the Fermi theory of beta decay [2]
The experiment pioneered the delayed coincidence technique to search for the reaction: ]e + p → e+ + n, where an electron antineutrino from the Hanford nuclear reactor interacted with a free proton in a large tank filled with cadmiumloaded liquid scintillator
The number of events in each detector after the background subtraction has been compared with the expected number of events, based on the reactor neutrino flux, detection efficiency, neutrino oscillations, and contribution from the reactors to each detector determined by the baselines and reactor fluxes
Summary
80 Years of Reactor Neutrino PhysicsInvented by Pauli [1] in 1930, named by Amaldi in 1934, and later modeled in the Fermi theory of beta decay [2]. Starting at the Hanford nuclear reactor (Washington), they later moved to the new Savannah River Plant (South Carolina) to perform their definitive and groundbreaking experimental detection. This breakthrough had two important consequences: resolving and clarifying the unsatisfactory situation of a fundamental particle needed for the consistency of theory, but first thought to be unobservable, and demonstrating the possibility of using neutrinos as a sensitive probe of particle physics. The background rate in the final sample is obtained as 12.45±5.93 (near) or 2.59±0.75 (far) events per day from a fit to the delay time distribution with an observed mean decay time of ∼250 ms
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