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Title: Reactor neutrino spectral distortions play little role in mass hierarchy experiments

Journal Article · · Physical Review D
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2];  [3]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States). Dept. of Physics
  2. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  3. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States). Dept. of Physics
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The Coulomb enhancement of low energy electrons in nuclear beta decay generates sharp cutoffs in the accompanying antineutrino spectrum at the beta decay endpoint energies. It has been conjectured that these features will interfere with measuring the effect of a neutrino mass hierarchy on an oscillated nuclear reactor antineutrino spectrum. These sawtoothlike features will appear in detailed reactor antineutrino spectra, with characteristic energy scales similar to the oscillation period critical to neutrino mass hierarchy determination near a 53 km baseline. However, these sawtoothlike distortions are found to contribute at a magnitude of only a few percent relative to the mass hierarchy-dependent oscillation pattern in Fourier space. In the Fourier cosine and sine transforms, the features that encode a neutrino mass hierarchy dominate by over sixteen (thirty-three) times in prominence to the maximal contribution of the sawtoothlike distortions from the detailed energy spectrum, given 3.2 % / √ Evis/MeV (perfect) detector energy resolution. The effect of these distortions is shown to be negligible even when the uncertainties in the reactor spectrum, oscillation parameters, and counting statistics are considered. This result is shown to hold even when the opposite hierarchy oscillation patterns are nearly degenerate in energy space, if energy response nonlinearities are controlled to below 0.5%. Therefore with accurate knowledge of detector energy response, the sawtoothlike features in reactor antineutrino spectra will not significantly impede neutrino mass hierarchy measurements using reactor antineutrinos.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
89233218CNA000001
OSTI ID:
1495152
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-18-23776; PRVDAQ
Journal Information:
Physical Review D, Vol. 99, Issue 3; ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 6 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Figures / Tables (11)

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FIG. 6(p. 8)figure FIG. 6
FIG. 7(p. 8)figure FIG. 7
FIG. 8(p. 9)figure FIG. 8
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Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
Atomic
Nuclear and Particle Physics
Beta decay
Neutrino oscillations
Neutrinos
Ab initio calculations
Neutrino detectors