Reactor Neutrino Spectra Hayes, Anna C; Vogel, Petr
Annual review of nuclear and particle science,
10/2016, Letnik:
66, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present a review of the antineutrino spectra emitted from reactors. Knowledge of these spectra and their associated uncertainties is crucial for neutrino oscillation studies. The spectra used to ...date have been determined either by converting measured electron spectra to antineutrino spectra or by summing over all of the thousands of transitions that make up the spectra, using modern databases as input. The uncertainties in the subdominant corrections to β-decay plague both methods, and we provide estimates of these uncertainties. Improving on current knowledge of the antineutrino spectra from reactors will require new experiments. Such experiments would also address the so-called reactor neutrino anomaly and the possible origin of the shoulder observed in the antineutrino spectra measured in recent high-statistics reactor neutrino experiments.
The physics responsible for neutrino masses and lepton mixing remains unknown. More experimental data are needed to constrain and guide possible generalizations of the standard model of particle ...physics, and reveal the mechanism behind nonzero neutrino masses. Here, the physics associated with searches for the violation of lepton-flavor conservation in charged-lepton processes and the violation of lepton-number conservation in nuclear physics processes is summarized. In the first part, several aspects of charged-lepton flavor violation are discussed, especially its sensitivity to new particles and interactions beyond the standard model of particle physics. The discussion concentrates mostly on rare processes involving muons and electrons. In the second part, the status of the conservation of total lepton number is discussed. The discussion here concentrates on current and future probes of this apparent law of Nature via searches for neutrinoless double beta decay, which is also the most sensitive probe of the potential Majorana nature of neutrinos.
A weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is perhaps the most promising candidate for the dark matter in the Galactic halo. The WIMP detection rate in laboratory searches is fixed by the cross ...section for elastic WIMP-nucleus scattering. Here we calculate the contribution to this cross section from two-nucleon currents from pion exchange in the nucleus and show that it may, in some cases, be comparable to the one-nucleon current that has been considered in prior work and perhaps help resolve the discrepancies between the various direct dark-matter search experiments. We provide simple expressions that allow these new contributions to be included in current calculations.
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