Systematic impact of spent nuclear fuel on θ13 sensitivity at reactor neutrino experiment

• Published in: Chinese physics C 2009-09, Vol.33 (9), p.711-716
• Main Author: 安丰鹏 田新春 占亮 曹俊
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 中微子实验; 反应堆; 振荡实验; 核燃料; 混合灵敏度; 电流限制; 系统不确定性; 置信水平
• ISSN: 1674-1137; 0254-3052; 2058-6132
• DOI: 10.1088/1674-1137/33/9/001

Reactor neutrino oscillation experiments, such as Daya Bay, Double Chooz and RENO are designed to determine the neutrino mixing angle θ13 with a sensitivity of 0.01--0.03 in sin^2 2θ13 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^22θ13 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 X2 analysis shows that this uncertainty will degrade the θ13 sensitivity at a negligible level.