Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session Z14: Neutrinos IV
3:30 PM–5:18 PM,
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Sheraton
Room: Plaza Court 3
Sponsoring
Unit:
DPF
Chair: Young-Kee Kim
Abstract: Z14.00003 : Reactor Neutrino Spectral Distortions Play Little Role in Mass Hierarchy Experiments
3:54 PM–4:06 PM
View Presentation Abstract
Presenter:
Daine L. Danielson
(Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Davis)
Authors:
Daine L. Danielson
(Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Davis)
Anna C. Hayes
(Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Gerald T. Garvey
(University of Washington, Physics Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory)
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. However, these sawtooth-like 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 sawtooth-like 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%.
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