Systematic impact of spent nuclear fuel on θ 13 sensitivity at reactor neutrino experiment

作者：Fengpeng An, Tian Xin-Chun, Zhan Liang, Cao Jun · 发表于：Chinese Physics C · 年份：2009 · DOI：10.1088/1674-1137/33/9/001 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Neutrino Physics Research、Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena、Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies

Reactor neutrino oscillation experiments, such as Daya Bay, Double Chooz and RENO are designed to determine the neutrino mixing angle θ 13 with a sensitivity of 0.01–0.03 in sin 2 2θ 13 at 90% confidence level, an improvement over the current limit by more than one order of magnitude. The control of systematic uncertainties is critical to achieving the sin 2 2θ 13 sensitivity goal of these experiments. Antineutrinos emitted from spent nuclear fuel (SNF) would distort the soft part of energy spectrum and may introduce a non-negligible systematic uncertainty. In this article, a detailed calculation of SNF neutrinos is performed taking account of the operation of a typical reactor and the event rate in the detector is obtained. A further estimation shows that the event rate contribution of SNF neutrinos is less than 0.2% relative to the reactor neutrino signals. A global χ 2 analysis shows that this uncertainty will degrade the θ 13 sensitivity at a negligible level.