REACTOR NEUTRINO EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Previous searches for neutrino oscillations with reactor neutrinos have been done only with baselines less than 1 km. The observed neutrino flux was consistent with the expectation and only excluded regions were drawn on the neutrino-oscillation-parameter space. Thus, those experiments played important roles in understanding neutrinos from fission reactors. Based on the knowledge from those experiments, an experiment with about a 180 km baseline became possible. Results obtained from this baseline experiment showed evidence for reactor neutrino disappearance and finally provide a resolution for the long standing solar neutrino problem when combined with results from the solar neutrino experiments. Several possibilities to explore the last unmeasured mixing angle θ13 with reactor neutrinos have recently been proposed. They will provide complementary information to long baseline accelerator experiments when one tries to solve the degeneracy of oscillation parameters. Reactor neutrinos are also useful to study the neutrino magnetic moment and the most stringent limits from terrestrial experiments are obtained by measuring the elastic scattering cross section of reactor neutrinos.