A Sterile Neutrino Search at compact materials irradiation facility

TL;DR

This paper proposes using the China-based compact material irradiation facility (CMIF) as a novel platform to search for sterile neutrinos through short baseline electron antineutrino disappearance experiments, leveraging high neutrino flux and large detector sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental setup at CMIF for sterile neutrino searches, demonstrating its potential to explore high-$ ext{Δ}m^2$ regions with competitive sensitivity.

Findings

High antineutrino production rate of up to 2.0×10^{19} per day.

Potential to investigate sterile neutrino parameter space effectively.

Sensitive to high-$ ext{Δ}m^2$ regions ($>10$ eV²).

Abstract

The compact material irradiation facility (CMIF) is a current project in China that will provide a compact deuteron-beryllium neutron source. The target of this facility will be an intense and compact Isotope Decay-At-Rest (IsoDAR) neutrino source. In this paper, we propose to test the sterile neutrino hypothesis using CMIF as the neutrino source. At CMIF platform, the electron antineutrino production rate can be up to $2.0\times 10^{19}$ per day. When paired with an 80 t liquid scintillator detector to study short baseline electron antineutrino disappearance, the inverse beta decay (IBD) event rate is large enough to investigate the parameter ranges of interest for neutrino anomalies. Our sensitivity analysis shows that a short baseline experiment at this platform will provide a very competitive sterile neutrino search, especially in the high-$\Delta m^2$ region ($\Delta m^2 >10\,\text{eV}^2$).