Searches for sterile neutrinos at the DANSS experiment

Abstract

DANSS is a highly segmented 1 m3 plastic scintillator detector. The DANSS detector is placed under an industrial 3.1 GWth reactor of the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant 350 km NW from Moscow. The distance to the core is varied on-line from 10.7 m to 12.7 m. The reactor building provides about 50 m water-equivalent shielding against the cosmic background. DANSS detects almost 5000 νe per day at the closest position with the cosmic background less than 3%. The inverse beta decay process is used to detect νe. Sterile neutrinos are searched for assuming the 4ν model (3 active and 1 sterile ν). The exclusion area in the Δm142,sin22θ14 plane is obtained using a ratio of positron energy spectra collected at different distances. Therefore results do not depend on the shape and normalization of the reactor νe spectrum nor the detector efficiency. Results are based on 966 thousand antineutrino events collected at three different distances from the reactor core. The excluded area covers a wide range of the sterile neutrino parameters down to sin22θ14 < 0.01 in the most sensitive region.