3 years ago

# Search for sterile neutrinos at the DANSS experiment.

I. Alekseev, V. Belov, V. Brudanin, M. Danilov, V. Egorov, D. Filosofov, M. Fomina, Z. Hons, S. Kazartsev, A. Kobyakin, A. Kuznetsov, I. Machikhiliyan, D. Medvedev, V. Nesterov, A. Olshevsky, N. Pogorelov, D. Ponomarev, I. Rozova, N. Rumyantseva, V. Rusinov, E. Samigullin, Ye. Shevchik, M. Shirchenko, Yu. Shitov, N. Skrobova, A. Starostin, D. Svirida, E. Tarkovsky, J. Vlášek, I. Zhitnikov, D. Zinatulina

DANSS is a highly segmented 1~m${}^3$ plastic scintillator detector. Its 2500 one meter long scintillator strips have a Gd-loaded reflective cover. The DANSS detector is placed under an industrial 3.1~$\mathrm{GW_{th}}$ reactor of the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant 350~km NW from Moscow. The distance to the core is varied on-line from 10.7~m to 12.7~m. The reactor building provides about 50~m water-equivalent shielding against the cosmic background. DANSS detects almost 5000 $\widetilde\nu_e$ per day at the closest position with the cosmic background less than 3$\%$. The inverse beta decay process is used to detect $\widetilde\nu_e$. Sterile neutrinos are searched for assuming the $4\nu$ model (3 active and 1 sterile $\nu$). The exclusion area in the $\Delta m_{14}^2,\sin^22\theta_{14}$ plane is obtained using a ratio of positron energy spectra collected at different distances. Therefore results do not depend on the shape and normalization of the reactor $\widetilde\nu_e$ spectrum, as well as on the detector efficiency. Results are based on 966 thousand antineutrino events collected at 3 distances from the reactor core. The excluded area covers a wide range of the sterile neutrino parameters up to $\sin^22\theta_{14}<0.01$ in the most sensitive region.

Publisher URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04046

DOI: arXiv:1804.04046v3

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