The PROSPECT Antineutrino Detector and Early Physics Results

by Xianyi Zhang

Thursday 7 Mar 2019, 13:30 → 14:30 US/Eastern

Small Seminar Room

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.