The Double Chooz Experiment presents an indication of reactor electron antineutrino disappearance consistent with neutrino oscillations. An observed-to-predicted ratio of events of 0.944 ± 0.016 (stat) ± 0.040 (syst) was obtained in 101 days of running at the Chooz Nuclear Power Plant in France, with two 4.25 GW th reactors. The results were obtained from a single 10 m 3 fiducial volume detector located 1050 m from the two reactor cores. The reactor antineutrino flux prediction used the Bugey4 flux measurement after correction for differences in core composition. The deficit can be interpreted as an indication of a non-zero value of the still unmeasured neutrino mixing parameter sin 2 2θ13. Analyzing both the rate of the prompt positrons and their energy spectrum we find sin 2 2θ13= 0.086 ± 0.041 (stat) ±0.030 (syst), or, at 90% CL, 0.017 < sin 2 2θ13 < 0.16. We report first results of a search for a non-zero neutrino oscillation [1] mixing angle, θ 13 , based on reactor antineutrino disappearance. This is the last of the three neutrino oscillation mixing angles [2,3] for which only upper limits [4,5] are available. The size of θ 13 sets the required sensitivity of long-baseline oscillation experiments attempting to measure CP violation in the neutrino sector or the mass hierarchy.In reactor experiments [6,7] addressing the disappearance ofν e , θ 13 determines the survival probability of electron antineutrinos at the "atmospheric" squaredmass difference, ∆m 2 atm . This probability is given by:where L is the distance from reactor to detector in meters and E the energy of the antineutrino in MeV. The full formula can be found in Ref.[1]. Eq. 1 provides a direct way to measure θ 13 since the only additional input is the well measured value of |∆m 2 atm | = (2.32Other running reactor experiments [9,10] are using the same technique.Electron antineutrinos of < 9 MeV are produced by reactors and detected through inverse beta decay (IBD): ν e + p → e + + n. Detectors based on hydrocarbon liquid scintillators provide the free proton targets. The IBD signature is a coincidence of a prompt positron signal followed by a delayed neutron capture. We present here our first results with a detector located ∼ 1050 m from the two 4.25 GW th thermal power reactors of the Chooz Nuclear Power Plant and under a 300 MWE rock overburden. The analysis is based on 101 days of data including 16 days with one reactor off and one day with both reactors off.The antineutrino flux of each reactor depends on its thermal power and, for the four main fissioning isotopes, 235 U, 239 Pu, 238 U, 241 Pu, their fraction of the total fuel content, their energy released per fission, and their fission and capture cross-sections. The fission rates and associated errors were evaluated using two predictive and complementary reactor simulation codes: MURE [17,18] and DRAGON [19]. This allowed a study of the sensitivity to the important reactor parameters (e.g.. thermal power, boron concentration, temperatures and densities). The quality of these simulations...
The four LEP collaborations, ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL, have searched for the neutral Higgs bosons which are predicted by the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). The data of the four collaborations are statistically combined and examined for their consistency with the background hypothesis and with a possible Higgs boson signal. The combined LEP data show no significant excess of events which would indicate the production of Higgs bosons. The search results are used to set upper bounds on the cross-sections of various Higgs-like event topologies. The results are interpreted within the MSSM in a number of "benchmark" models, including CP-conserving and CP-violating scenarios. These interpretations lead in all cases to large exclusions in the MSSM parameter space. Absolute limits are set on the parameter tan β and, in some scenarios, on the masses of neutral Higgs bosons.
The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment uses an acceleratorproduced neutrino beam to perform precision measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters in the "atmospheric neutrino" sector associated with muon neutrino disappearance. This long-baseline experiment measures neutrino interactions in Fermilab's NuMI neutrino beam with a near detector at Fermilab and again 735 km downstream with a far detector in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. The two detectors are magnetized steel-scintillator tracking calorimeters. They are designed to be as similar as possible in order to ensure that differences in detector response have minimal impact on the comparisons of event rates, energy spectra and topologies that are essential to MINOS measurements of oscillation parameters. The design, construction, calibration and performance of the far and near detectors are described in this paper.
This Letter reports new results from the MINOS experiment based on a two-year exposure to muon neutrinos from the Fermilab NuMI beam. Our data are consistent with quantum-mechanical oscillations of neutrino flavor with mass splitting |Deltam2| = (2.43+/-0.13) x 10(-3) eV2 (68% C.L.) and mixing angle sin2(2theta) > 0.90 (90% C.L.). Our data disfavor two alternative explanations for the disappearance of neutrinos in flight: namely, neutrino decays into lighter particles and quantum decoherence of neutrinos, at the 3.7 and 5.7 standard-deviation levels, respectively.
Very energetic astrophysical events are required to accelerate cosmic rays to above 10(18) electronvolts. GRBs (γ-ray bursts) have been proposed as possible candidate sources. In the GRB 'fireball' model, cosmic-ray acceleration should be accompanied by neutrinos produced in the decay of charged pions created in interactions between the high-energy cosmic-ray protons and γ-rays. Previous searches for such neutrinos found none, but the constraints were weak because the sensitivity was at best approximately equal to the predicted flux. Here we report an upper limit on the flux of energetic neutrinos associated with GRBs that is at least a factor of 3.7 below the predictions. This implies either that GRBs are not the only sources of cosmic rays with energies exceeding 10(18) electronvolts or that the efficiency of neutrino production is much lower than has been predicted.
We present the results of time-integrated searches for astrophysical neutrino sources in both the northern and southern skies. Data were collected using the partially completed IceCube detector in the 40-string configuration recorded between 2008 April 5 and 2009 May 20, totaling 375.5 days livetime. An unbinned maximum likelihood ratio method is used to search for astrophysical signals. The data sample contains 36,900 events: 14,121 from the northern sky, mostly muons induced by atmospheric neutrinos, and 22,779 from the southern sky, mostly high-energy atmospheric muons. The analysis includes searches for individual point sources and stacked searches for sources in a common class, sometimes including a spatial extent. While this analysis is sensitive to TeV-PeV energy neutrinos in the northern sky, it is primarily sensitive to neutrinos with energy greater than about 1 PeV in the southern sky. No evidence for a signal is found in any of the searches. Limits are set for neutrino fluxes from astrophysical sources over the entire sky and compared to predictions. The sensitivity is at least a factor of two better than previous searches (depending on declination), with 90% confidence level muon neutrino flux upper limits being between E 2 dΦ/dE ∼ 2-200 × 10 −12 TeV cm −2 s −1 in the northern sky and between 3-700 × 10 −12 TeV cm −2 s −1 in the southern sky. The stacked source searches provide the best limits to specific source classes. The full IceCube detector is expected to improve the sensitivity to dΦ/dE ∝ E −2 sources by another factor of two in the first year of operation.
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