Sensitivity of DANSS detector to short range neutrino oscillations

TL;DR

The DANSS detector, a highly segmented plastic scintillator array near a nuclear reactor, is designed to detect short-range neutrino oscillations, with promising sensitivity despite energy resolution limitations, aided by high counting rates and calibration capabilities.

Contribution

This paper presents the design, calibration, and expected sensitivity of the DANSS detector for short-range neutrino oscillation studies, including prototype test results.

Findings

DANSS can detect reactor antineutrinos with high rate and low background.

Prototype tests show feasibility of reaching design performance.

Sensitivity to sterile neutrino oscillations is promising despite energy smearing.

Abstract

DANSS is a highly segmented $1m^3$ plastic scintillator detector. Its 2500 scintillator strips have a Gd loaded reflective cover. Light is collected with 3 wave length shifting fibers per strip and read out with 50 PMTs and 2500 SiPMs. The DANSS will be installed under the industrial 3GW$_{th}$ reactor of the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant at distances varying from 9.7m to 12.2m from the reactor core. PMTs and SiPMs collect about 30 photo electrons per MeV distributed approximately equally between two types of the readout. Light collection non-uniformity across and along the strip is about $\pm13\%$ from maximum to minimum. The resulting energy resolution is modest, $\sigma/E=15\%$ at 5MeV. This leads to a smearing of the oscillation pattern comparable with the smearing due to the large size of the reactor core. Nevertheless because of the large counting rate ($\sim 10000$ / day), small background ($<1\%$) and good control of systematic uncertainties due to frequent changes of positions, the DANSS is quite sensitive to reactor antineutrino oscillations to hypothetical sterile neutrinos with a mass in eV ballpark suggested recently to explain a so-called "reactor anomaly". DANSS will have an elaborated calibration system. The high granularity of the detector allows calibration of every strip with about 40 thousand cosmic muons every day. The expected systematic effects do not reduce much the sensitivity region. Tests of the detector prototype DANSSino demonstrated that in spite of a small size ($4\%$ of DANSS), it is quite sensitive to reactor antineutrinos, detecting about 70 Inverse Beta Decay events per day with the signal-to-background ratio of about unity. The prototype tests have demonstrated feasibility to reach the design performance of the DANSS detector.