Testing the Gallium Anomaly

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scintillation experiment using GAGG to detect mono-energetic neutrinos from a $^{51}$Cr source, aiming to test the gallium anomaly with high statistical significance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup with GAGG scintillator and a high-intensity neutrino source to independently verify the gallium anomaly.

Findings

Approximately 760 gallium capture events expected with 85% purity.

About 680,000 neutrino-electron scattering events for normalization.

Potential to test the gallium anomaly at over 5 sigma significance.

Abstract

We study the online detection by gallium capture of mono-energetic neutrinos produced by a $^{51}$Cr radioactive source in a scintillation experiment. We find that cerium-doped gadolinium aluminum gallium garnet (GAGG) is a suitable scintillator which contains about 21% of gallium per weight and has a high mass density and light yield. Combined with a highly efficient light detection system this allows tagging of the subsequent germanium decay and thus a clean distinction of gallium capture and elastic neutrino electron scattering events. With 1.5 tons of scintillator and 10 source runs of 3.4MCi, each, we obtain about 760 gallium capture events with a purity of 85% and 680,000 neutrino electron scattering events, where the latter provide a precise normalization independent of any nuclear physics. This configuration would allow to test the gallium anomaly at more than $5\sigma$ in an independent way.