1. Particle Physics Seminar

    "The PROSPECT Antineutrino Detector and Early Physics Results"

    Presented by Xianyi Zhang, Illinois Institute of Technology

    Thursday, March 7, 2019, 1:30 pm
    Small Seminar Room, Bldg. 510

    Hosted by: Elizabeth Worcester

    PROSPECT, Precision Reactor Oscillation and SPECTrum, is a short baseline reactor antineutrino experiment. The PROSPECT antineutrino detector is an optically segmented liquid scintillator detector deployed ~7 m from a highly enriched U-235 reactor. This detector was designed to investigate discrepancies in the reactor antineutrino flux and spectrum by model-independently probing the eV-scale sterile neutrino oscillation from nuclear fission reactor, as well as precisely measuring the U-235 antineutrino spectrum. The particle multi-segment scattering in PROSPECT detector brought a typical challenge in characterizing the scintillator nonlinearity. This talk details the energy scale study for PROSPECT with data-MC comparison of detector calibrations. The detector construction, commissioning, and its early physics measurements are also presented.