大亚湾反应堆中微子实验

中微子振荡是目前唯一超出粒子物理标准模型的新现象，它证明了中微子质量不为零，对粒子物理、天体物理与宇宙学均有非常重要的意义．在描述中微子振荡的6个参数中，目前仍有两个未知：交叉混合角θ13与CP相角δ．作者建议在大亚湾反应堆附近建设一个中微子实验站，测量混合角sin^2θ13，在90％的置信度下达到0．01的精度，较过去的实验提高近一个数量级．这将对中微子物理的未来发展提供方向性指导，特别是对理解宇宙中“反物质消失之谜”具有重要意义．     

大亚湾反应堆中微子实验

中微子振荡是目前唯一超出粒子物理标准模型的新现象,它证明了中微子质量不为零,对粒子物理、天体物理与宇宙学均有非常重要的意义.在描述中微子振荡的6个参数中,目前仍有两个未知：交叉混合角θ13与CP相角δ. 作者建议在大亚湾反应堆附近建设一个中微子实验站,测量混合角sin22θ13在90%的置信度下达到0.01 的精度,较过去的实验提高近一个数量级.这将对中微子物理的未来发展提供方向性指导,特别是对理解宇宙中“反物质消失之谜”具有重要意义.     

中微子非标准相互作用对大亚湾实验的影响

大亚湾中微子实验的目标是测量中微子混合矩阵中的最小混合角θ13.如果考虑中微子的非标准相互作用(NSIs),中微子的振荡概率公式要做相应的改写,其效应将和θ13纠缠在一起,从而降低了实验对θ13的敏感度(sensitivity).讨论了在NSIs存在的情况下大亚湾实验对θ13的敏感度,发现这个实验不可能同时测量出NSIs和θ13的值.由于当θ13=0时反应堆产生的反中微子将没有振荡现象(NSIs的效应也将消失),如果大亚湾实验测量到了中微子振荡效应,那将表明θ13≠0;但是,由于非零的θ13的效应和NSIs的效应有可能抵消而导致中微子没有振荡.如果大亚湾实验没有测量到中微子振荡,不能排除非零的θ13.     

PMT waveform modeling at the Daya Bay experiment

Detailed measurements of Hamamatsu R5912 photomultiplier signals are presented, including the single photoelectron charge response, waveform shape, nonlinearity, saturation, overshoot, oscillation, prepulsing, and afterpulsing. The results were used to build a detailed model of the PMT signal characteristics over a wide range of light intensities. Including the PMT model in simulated Daya Bay particle interactions shows no significant systematic effects that are detrimental to the experimental sensitivity.     

Onsite data processing and monitoring for the Daya Bay experiment

The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment started running on September 23, 2011. The offline computing environment, consisting of 11 servers at Daya Bay, was built to process onsite data. With the current computing ability, onsite data processing is running smoothly. The Performance Quality Monitoring system (PQM) has been developed to monitor the detector performance and data quality. Its main feature is the ability to efficiently process multiple data streams from the three experimental halls. The PQM processes raw data files from the Daya Bay data acquisition system, generates and publishes histograms via a graphical web interface by executing the user-defined algorithm modules, and saves the histograms for permanent storage. The fact that the whole process takes only around 40 minutes makes it valuable for the shift crew to monitor the running status of all the sub-detectors and the data quality.     

Design and preliminary test results of Daya Bay RPC modules

Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) modules will be used as one part of the cosmic muon veto system in the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment. A total of 189 RPC modules will cover the three water pools in the experiment. To achieve track reconstruction and high efficiency, each module consists of 4 layers, each of which contains two sizes of bare chambers. The placement of bare chambers is reversed in different layers to reduce the overlapping dead areas. The module efficiency and patch efficiency were studied both in simulation and test of the data analysis. 143 modules have been constructed and tested. The preliminary study shows that the module and patch 3 out of 4 layers efficiency reaches about 98%.     

Bounds on neutrino mixing with exotic singlet neutrinos

We examine the effects of mixing induced non-diagonal light-heavy neutrino weak neutral currents on the amplitude for the process (with a=e, μ or τ). By imposing constraint that the amplitude should not exceed the perturbative unitarity limit at high energy , we obtain bounds on light-heavy neutrino mixing parameter sin² where is the mixing angle. In the case of one heavy neutrino (mass mξ) or mass degenerate heavy neutrinos, for Λ=1 TeV, no bound is obtained for mξ<0.50 TeV. However, sin² ≤3.8 × 10⁻⁶ for mξ=5 TeV and sin ≤6.0 × 10⁻⁸ for mξ=10 TeV. For Λ=∞, no constraint is obtained for mξ<0.99 TeV and sin² ≤3.8 × 10⁻² (for mξ=5 TeV) and sin² ≤9.6 × 10⁻³ (for mξ=10 TeV).     

Atmospheric neutrinos and discovery of neutrino oscillations

Neutrino oscillation was discovered through studies of neutrinos produced by cosmic-ray interactions in the atmosphere. These neutrinos are called atmospheric neutrinos. They are produced as decay products in hadronic showers resulting from collisions of cosmic rays with nuclei in the atmosphere. Electron-neutrinos and muon-neutrinos are produced mainly by the decay chain of charged pions to muons to electrons. Atmospheric neutrino experiments observed zenith-angle and energy dependent deficit of muon-neutrino events. Neutrino oscillations between muon-neutrinos and tau-neutrinos explain these data well. Neutrino oscillations imply that neutrinos have small but non-zero masses. The small neutrino masses have profound implications to our understanding of elementary particle physics and the Universe. This article discusses the experimental discovery of neutrino oscillations.     

Study of RPC gas composition using Daya Bay RPCs

This study uses Daya Bay RPCs operating in streamer mode to investigate gas mixtures of at least 50% argon, at most 6% isobutane, and with small amounts of SF6. Isobutane is reduced to 2% without degradation of performance, and SF6 reduces the noise rate and current, as well as the signal size. This study provides quantitative relationships between basic RPC operating parameters and various gas compositions.     

Study of RPC gas composition using Daya Bay RPCs

This study uses Daya Bay RPCs operating in streamer mode to investigate gas mixtures of at least 50% argon,at most 6% isobutane,and with small amounts of SF6.Isobutane is reduced to 2% without degradation of performance,and SF6 reduces the noise rate and current,as well as the signal size.This study provides quantitative relationships between basic RPC operating parameters and various gas compositions.     

Precision measurements and tau neutrino physics in a future accelerator neutrino experiment

We investigate prospects of building a future accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiment in China, including site selection, beam optimization and tau neutrino physics aspects. CP violation, non-unitary mixing and non-standard neutrino interactions are discussed. We simulate neutrino beam setups based on muon and beta decay techniques and compare Chinese laboratory sites by their expected sensitivities. A case study on the Super Proton–Proton Collider and the China JinPing Laboratory is also presented. It is shown that the muon-decay-based beam setup can measure the Dirac CP phase by about 14.2° precision at 1σ CL, whereas non-unitarity can be probed down to ∣α_ij∣ ≲ 0.37 (i ≠ j = 1, 2, 3) and non-standard interactions to $| {epsilon }_{{ell }{ell }^{prime} }^{m}| lesssim $ 0.11 (${ell }ne {ell }^{prime} =e$, μ, τ) at 90% CL, respectively.     

Probing pseudo-Dirac neutrino through detection of neutrino-induced muons from gamma ray burst neutrinos

The possibility to verify the pseudo-Dirac nature of neutrinos is investigated here via the detection of ultra-high energy neutrinos from distant cosmological objects like γ-ray bursts (GRBs). The very long baseline and the energy range from ∼TeV to ∼EeV for such neutrinos invoke the likelihood to probe very small pseudo-Dirac splittings. The expected secondary muons from such neutrinos that can be detected by a kilometer scale detector such as ICECUBE is calculated and compared with the same in the case of mass-flavour oscillations and for no oscillation cases. The calculated muon yields indicate that to probe such small pseudo-Dirac splittings one needs to look for a nearby GRB (red shift z ∼ 0.03 or less) whereas for a distant GRB (z ∼ 1) the flux will be much depleted and such phenomenon cannot be distinguished. Also calculated are the muon-to-shower ratios.      

Can a non-unitary effect be prominent In neutrino oscillation measurements?

Subject to neutrino experiments, the mixing matrix of ordinary neutrinos can still have small vi-olation from unitarity. We introduce a quasi-unitary matrix to interpret this violation and propose a natural scheme to parameterize it. A quasi-unitary factor △QF is defined to be measured in neutrino oscillation exper-iments and the numerical results show that the improvement in experimental precision may help us figure out the secret of neutrino mixing.     

Can a non-unitary effect be prominent in neutrino oscillation measurements?

Subject to neutrino experiments, the mixing matrix of ordinary neutrinos can still have small vi-olation from unitarity. We introduce a quasi-unitary matrix to interpret this violation and propose a natural scheme to parameterize it. A quasi-unitary factor △QF is defined to be measured in neutrino oscillation exper-iments and the numerical results show that the improvement in experimental precision may help us figure out the secret of neutrino mixing.     

Massive and massless neutrinos on unbalanced seesaws

The observation of neutrino oscillations requires new physics beyond the standard model (SM). A SM-like gauge theory with p lepton families can be extended by introducing q heavy right-handed Majorana neutrinos but preserving its SU(2)_L×U(1)_Y gauge symmetry. The overall neutrino mass matrix M turns out to be a symmetric (p+q)×(p+q) matrix. Given p>q, the rank of $M$ is in general equal to 2q,corresponding to 2q non-zero mass eigenvalues. The existence of (p-q) massless left-handed Majorana neutrinos is an exact consequence of the model, independent of the usual approximation made in deriving the Type-I seesaw relation between the effective p×p light Majorana neutrino mass matrix M_ν and the q×q heavy Majorana neutrino mass matrix M_R. In other words, the numbers of massive left- and right-handed neutrinos are fairly matched. A good example to illustrate this "seesaw fair play rule" is the minimal seesaw model with p=3 and q=2, in which one massless neutrino sits on the unbalanced seesaw.     

Supernova neutrino detection on earth

In this paper,we first discuss the detection of supernova neutrinos on earth.Then we propose a possible method to acquire information about θ13 smaller than 1.5° by detecting the ratio of the event numbers of different flavor supernova neutrinos.Such an sensitivity cannot yet be achieved by the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment.     

Supernova neutrino detection on earth

In this paper, we first discuss the detection of supernova neutrinos on earth. Then we propose a possible method to acquire information about θ13 smaller than 1.5° by detecting the ratio of the event numbers of different flavor supernova neutrinos. Such an sensitivity cannot yet be achieved by the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment.     

Neutrino anomaly and ν-nucleus interactions

A review of various calculations of the inclusive quasi-elastic reactions and pion production processes in neutrino reactions for various nuclei at intermediate energies relevant to solar, atmospheric and accelerator neutrinos is presented