High Energy / Nuclear Theory / RIKEN Seminars

[HET Seminar] Reevaluating Reactor Antineutrino Anomalies with Updated Flux Predictions

Name: [HET Seminar] Reevaluating Reactor Antineutrino Anomalies with Updated Flux Predictions
Start: 2019-10-02T13:30:00-04:00
End: 2019-10-02T14:20:00-04:00
Location: No location set

by Jeffrey Berryman (University of Kentucky)

Wednesday 2 Oct 2019, 13:30 → 14:20 US/Eastern

Small seminar room

Description

As the number of experimental searches for oscillations involving additional, sterile neutrinos has grown, the evidence for (or against) the latter's existence has become more ambiguous. Part of this ambiguity is attributable to the predicted flux of antineutrinos from nuclear reactors: the systematic uncertainties that enter into any such evaluation can muddy the water substantially. In this talk, I discuss how the sterile neutrino hypothesis fares when the global reactor antineutrino dataset is analyzed with respect to three particular flux predictions – the traditional Huber-Mueller fluxes and two new calculations – and consider how current and future electron-neutrino disappearance experiments may affect the situation over the coming decade.