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Possible origin of shoulder in the reactor antineutrino spectrum

Nuclear Theory 2017-11-09 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The re-analysis of measured 238U^{238}U integrated electron spectrum reveals a shape mismatch with respect to the so called ab initio calculation and the ratio resembles well with the recently observed reactor antineutrino shoulder or bump around 5 MeV prompt energy when plotted in a reduced scale where the first two moments (area and average) of the spectrum are made identical (KNO type scaling). However, such bumps are not seen in case of other actinides like 235U^{235}U and 239,241Pu^{239,241}Pu isotopes. Since the magnitude of the bump in 238U^{238}U is comparable with the experimental observations, 238U^{238}U can not be the only source of anomaly unless similar contributions come from other uranium and plutonium isotopes as well. Therefore, it is strongly conjectured that the integrated electron spectra of uranium and plutonium isotopes particularly in the 66 MeV to 88 MeV energy range may have additional contributions coming from the harder part of the reactor neutron spectrum which may not be present in the thermal measurements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.02801,
  title  = {Possible origin of shoulder in the reactor antineutrino spectrum},
  author = {Ajit Kumar Mohanty},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.02801},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures