Intensive electron antineutrino source with well defined hard spectrum on the base of nuclear reactor and 8-lithium transfer. The promising experiment for sterile neutrinos search

Abstract

Abstract The concept of combination $$ {\overline{\nu}}_e $$ ν ¯ e -source for future short-baseline experiments is discussed. The source ensures: 1) well defined hard antineutrino flux; 2) the rate of counts more than ∼ 103 per day in the detector volume ∼ m 3; 3) low level of $$ \left({\overline{\nu}}_e,p\right) $$ ν ¯ e p -count-errors — ≲ 1%. The source is based on (n, γ)-activation of 7Li near the reactor active zone and transport of the fast β −-decaying 8Li isotope toward a remote neutrino detector and back in the closed loop. We propose the low-errors-experiment for reliable search of sterile neutrinos with Δm 2 ∼ 1eV2. The results of simulation for (3+1) and (3+2) sterile neutrino models indicate the space regions for search of $$ {\overline{\nu}}_e $$ ν ¯ e -disappearance outside the interval of $$ {\overline{\nu}}_e $$ ν ¯ e -spectrum errors.