4-6 May 2015
Union South
US/Central timezone

PROSPECT: a short-baseline reactor antineutrino measurement

5 May 2015, 16:30
15m
Landmark, 3rd Floor (Union South)

Landmark, 3rd Floor

Union South

1308 West Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706
Non-Accelerator-Based Neutrino Physics Non-Accelerator-Based Neutrino

Speaker

Dr Karin Gilje (Illinois Institute of Technology)

Description

There has been increasing tension between direct reactor antineutrino measurements and models of antineutrino production. As a result, several collaborations have proposed to make high-resolution measurements of the reactor neutrino spectrum at a short baseline. One such collaboration is PROSPECT (the Precision Reactor Oscillation SPECTrum measurement). The goal is two-fold: a precision reactor antineutrino spectrum measurement and a sterile neutrino search. The detector will be installed near the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. HFIR uses Highly Enriched Uranium which means a pure U-235 antineutrino spectrum. An absolute measurement of this spectrum will constrain the current and future reactor models and improve our understanding of the total reactor antineutrino spectrum. Additionally, the planned detector is sufficiently large to perform a search for sterile neutrinos on the eV scale. Over the last year, PROSPECT has constructed and installed several prototypes in preparation for the final 2-ton Lithium-doped liquid scintillator detector. This talk will describe the status of PROSPECT in its various stages and the predicted sensitivity of its measurements.

Primary author

Dr Karin Gilje (Illinois Institute of Technology)

Presentation Materials