High flux lithium antineutrino source with variable hard spectrum. How to decrease the errors of the total spectrum ?

TL;DR

This paper proposes a high flux lithium antineutrino source using 7Li activation to produce a hard antineutrino spectrum, significantly reducing spectral errors and aiding sterile neutrino research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel continuous cycle scheme for lithium-based antineutrino production that halves the errors in the total spectrum compared to reactor-only sources.

Findings

Lithium source reduces spectral errors by over 50%.

The scheme enhances the detection of sterile neutrinos.

Continuous operation improves flux stability.

Abstract

The proposed high flux lithium antineutrino source is based on 7Li(n,g)8Li-activation and subsequent fast beta-decay (0.84 s) of the 8Li isotope with emission of hard antineutrinos with energy up to 13 MeV. In the discussed scheme the nuclear reactor is used as an intensive neutron source for (n,g)-activation. The created 8Li isotopes are transported in the channels with a high speed to the remote neutrino detector and removed back for the next activation. The antineutrino source operates in the continuous cycle in the closed loop. Use of 8Li hard antineutrino spectrum in the source scheme ensures significantly harder total antineutrino spectrum (compare to the reactor one) in the position of the detector. The analyses of errors of the total antineutrino spectrum (from reactor antineutrinos plus from lithium ones) confirmed that owing to the lithium the errors of the total antineutrino spectrum can be diminished in two times and more. The results of errors analysis is important for sterile neutrino search and the possible configuration of the experiment is discussed.