Study of the wave packet treatment of neutrino oscillation at Daya Bay

Creators: An, F. P.; McKeown, R. D.; Daya Bay Collaboration

Abstract

The disappearance of reactor ν¯e observed by the Daya Bay experiment is examined in the framework of a model in which the neutrino is described by a wave packet with a relative intrinsic momentum dispersion σ_(rel). Three pairs of nuclear reactors and eight antineutrino detectors, each with good energy resolution, distributed among three experimental halls, supply a high-statistics sample of ν¯e acquired at nine different baselines. This provides a unique platform to test the effects which arise from the wave packet treatment of neutrino oscillation. The modified survival probability formula was used to fit Daya Bay data, providing the first experimental limits: 2.38×10^(-17) < σ_(rel) < 0.23. Treating the dimensions of the reactor cores and detectors as constraints, the limits are improved: 10^(-(14) ≲ σ_(rel) < 0.23, and an upper limit of σ_ (rel) < 0.20 (which corresponds to σ_x ≳ 10^(-11) cm) is obtained. All limits correspond to a 95% C.L. Furthermore, the effect due to the wave packet nature of neutrino oscillation is found to be insignificant for reactor antineutrinos detected by the Daya Bay experiment thus ensuring an unbiased measurement of the oscillation parameters sin^2 2θ_(13) and Δm^2_(32) within the plane wave model.

Additional Information

© 2017 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Funded by SCOAP3. Received: 27 January 2017; Accepted: 2 June 2017; First Online: 14 September 2017. Daya Bay is supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the CAS Center for Excellence in Particle Physics, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Guangdong provincial government, the Shenzhen municipal government, the China General Nuclear Power Group, Key Laboratory of Particle and Radiation Imaging (Tsinghua University), the Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Particle Physics and Particle Irradiation (Shandong University), the Ministry of Education, Shanghai Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, the University Development Fund of The University of Hong Kong, the MOE program for Research of Excellence at National Taiwan University, National Chiao-Tung University, and NSC fund support from Taiwan, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic, the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the RFBR research program, the National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research of Chile, and the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program. We acknowledge Yellow River Engineering Consulting Co., Ltd., and China Railway 15th Bureau Group Co., Ltd., for building the underground laboratory. We are grateful for the ongoing cooperation from the China General Nuclear Power Group and China Light and Power Company.

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