Reactor Fuel Fraction Information on the Antineutrino Anomaly

Giunti, C.; Ji, X. P.; Laveder, M.; Li, Y. F.; Littlejohn, B. R.

research

Reactor Fuel Fraction Information on the Antineutrino Anomaly

Authors: C. Giunti
X. P. Ji
M. Laveder
Y. F. Li
B. R. Littlejohn
Publication date: 1 January 2017
Publisher: 'Springer Science and Business Media LLC'
Doi

Abstract

We analyzed the evolution data of the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment in terms of short-baseline active-sterile neutrino oscillations taking into account the theoretical uncertainties of the reactor antineutrino fluxes. We found that oscillations are disfavored at

2.6\sigma

with respect to a suppression of the

^{235}\text{U}

reactor antineutrino flux and at

2.5\sigma

with respect to variations of the

^{235}\text{U}

and

^{239}\text{Pu}

fluxes. On the other hand, the analysis of the rates of the short-baseline reactor neutrino experiments favor active-sterile neutrino oscillations and disfavor the suppression of the

^{235}\text{U}

flux at

3.1\sigma

and variations of the

^{235}\text{U}

and

^{239}\text{Pu}

fluxes at

2.8\sigma

. We also found that both the Daya Bay evolution data and the global rate data are well-fitted with composite hypotheses including variations of the

^{235}\text{U}

or

^{239}\text{Pu}

fluxes in addition to active-sterile neutrino oscillations. A combined analysis of the Daya Bay evolution data and the global rate data shows a slight preference for oscillations with respect to variations of the