Deployment and performance of a Low-Energy-Threshold Skipper-CCD inside a nuclear reactor

TL;DR

This paper reports the deployment of a low-energy-threshold Skipper-CCD inside a nuclear reactor, demonstrating its operational performance and potential for neutrino and BSM physics detection with sub-electron noise levels.

Contribution

First successful installation and operation of a Skipper-CCD inside a nuclear reactor environment, with detailed analysis of commissioning challenges and initial data collection.

Findings

Achieved sub-electron readout noise of 0.17 e-

Collected data during reactor ON and OFF periods

Demonstrated feasibility of using Skipper-CCD for reactor neutrino experiments

Abstract

Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) are used for reactor neutrino experiments and already shown their potential in constraining new physics models. The prospect of a Skipper-CCD experiment looking for standard and beyond standard model physics (BSM) in a nuclear reactor has been recently evaluated for different benchmark scenarios. Here we report the installation of the first 2 g Skipper-CCD inside the containment building of a 2 GW$_{th}$ nuclear power plant, positioned 12 meters from the center of the reactor core. We discuss the challenges involved in the commissioning of the detector and present data acquired during reactor ON and reactor OFF periods, with the detector operating with a sub-electron readout noise of 0.17 e-. The ongoing efforts to improve sensitivities to CEvNS and BSM interaction are also discussed.