The high energy neutrino nuisance at a medium baseline reactor experiment

Abstract

10 years from now medium baseline reactor experiments will attempt to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy from quantities associated to the Fourier transformed neutrino spectra. Recently Qian et al. have claimed that this goal may be impeded by the strong dependence of these quantities on the reactor neutrino flux and on slight variations of |ΔM322|. We demonstrate that this effect results from a spurious dependence of the quantities on the very high energy (8+ MeV) tail of the reactor neutrino spectrum. This dependence is spurious because the high energy tail depends upon decays of exotic isotopes and is insensitive to the mass hierarchy. An energy-dependent weight in the Fourier transform eliminates this spurious dependence without decreasing the chance of correctly determining the hierarchy.