1. Physics Colloquium

    "Anomalies in Reactor Neutrinos"

    Presented by Chao Zhang, BNL

    Tuesday, July 11, 2017, 3:30 pm
    Large Seminar Room, Bldg. 510

    Nuclear reactors are one of the most intense, pure, controllable, cost-effective and well-understood sources of neutrinos. Reactor neutrinos have played a major role in the discovery of neutrinos and neutrino oscillations. However, recently there emerged a few anomalies from reactor neutrino experiments when compared with state-of-the-art model predictions. The anomalies include a 5.5% deficit of the integrated antineutrino flux, a discrepancy in the antineutrino prompt energy spectrum around 5 MeV, and a 7.8% deficit in the 235U antineutrino flux from the new fuel evolution analysis in the Daya Bay Experiment. In this talk, those anomalies and their implications will be discussed. A new reactor neutrino experiment, PROSPECT, is aiming to resolve the anomalies by precisely measuring the 235U antineutrino spectrum at a very short baseline. The status of the PROSPECT experiment will also be reported