Speaker
Prof.
Mikhail Danilov
(ITEP, Representig the DANSS Collaboration (ITEP-JINR))
Description
DANSS is a highly segmented 1m^3 plastic scintillator
detector. It's 2500 scintillator strips have a Gd loaded reflective
cover. Light is collected with 3 wave length shifting fibers per
strip and read out with 50 PMTs and 2500 SiPMs. Light collection uniformity
across and along the strip as well as the photoelectron yield
are adequate to the physics goals of the experiment.
Continuous calibration of all strips will minimize the systematic uncertainties
in the detector response at different distances from the reactor.
Together with the a very high antineutrino counting rate of ~10 thousand per day
and a very low background level of less than ~1% this will lead to
a high sensitivity of the detector to short range neutrino oscillations.
The DANSS will be installed under the industrial 3GW reactor
of the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant at distances varying from 9.7mto
12.2m from the reactor core. Tests of the detector prototype
demonstrated that in spite of a small size
(20x20x100 cm^3), it is quite sensitive to reactor
antineutrinos, detecting about 70 Inverse Beta Decay events per day
with the signal-to-background ratio of about unity. The prototype
tests have demonstrated feasibility to reach the design performance
of the DANSS detector. The DANSS experiment will have a high
sensitivity to reactor antineutrino oscillations to sterile
neutrinos, suggested recently to explain a so-called "reactor
anomaly". It will start data taking early in 2015.
Primary author
Prof.
Mikhail Danilov
(ITEP, Representig the DANSS Collaboration (ITEP-JINR))
