Nuclear Data to Reduce Uncertainties in Reactor Antineutrino Measurements

Published

February 16, 2022

Author(s)

Hans Pieter Mumm, Catherine Romano, Nathaniel Bowden, Andrew Conant, Bethany Goldblum, Patrick Huber, Jonathan Link, Bryce Littlejohn, Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux, Shikha Prasad, Catherine Riddle, Alejandro Sonzogni, William Wieselquist

Abstract

The large quantities of antineutrinos produced through the decay of fission fragments in nuclear reactors provide an opportunity to study the properties of these particles and to investigate their use in reactor monitoring. The reactor antineutrino spectra are measured using specialized, large area detectors that detect antineutrinos through antineutrino-induced inverse beta decay, electron elastic scattering, or coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering. Reactor monitoring takes advantage of the differences in the antineutrino yield and spectra resulting from uranium and plutonium fission providing an opportunity to estimate the fissile material composition in the reactor. Recent experiments reveal a deviation between the measured and calculated antineutrino flux and spectra indicating either the existence of yet undiscovered neutrino physics, uncertainties in the reactor source term calculation, incorrect nuclear data, or a combination of all three.

Citation

OSTI

Pub Type

Others

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.2172/1842423

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Keywords

nuclear data, antineutrinos, reactor spectra

Citation

Mumm, H. , Romano, C. , Bowden, N. , Conant, A. , Goldblum, B. , Huber, P. , Link, J. , Littlejohn, B. , Ochoa-Ricoux, J. , Prasad, S. , Riddle, C. , Sonzogni, A. and Wieselquist, W. (2022), Nuclear Data to Reduce Uncertainties in Reactor Antineutrino Measurements, OSTI, [online], https://doi.org/10.2172/1842423, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=933948 (Accessed April 18, 2024)