Search for heavy sterile neutrinos at the Belgian BR2 reactor.

The neutrino oscillation experiments, together with cosmological constraints and direct neutrino measurement experiments, have firmly established that at least 2 of the neutrinos have a tiny but non-vanishing mass. This provides tantalizing experimental evidence for physics beyond the standard model. "Sterile" neutrinos, introduced in several simple extensions of the Standard Model, provide an alluring way to explain these observations, through the so-called "seesaw" mechanism. Such sterile neutrinos interact with our known world only through their mixing with the SM neutrinos. Depending on the number of these additional sterile neutrinos and their masses, several outstanding questions in the field can also be addressed eg. a few-keV sterile neutrino can serve as a dark matter candidate; CP violation associated to these sterile neutrinos can be introduced to solve the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe; and several historical experimental anomalies can be explained. We propose to search for heavy sterile neutrinos by using the newly constructed SoLid detector near the BR2 reactor of the SCK-CEN in Mol. The detector is unique in its kind and is among several newly staged short baseline reactor experiments. The data analysis proposed here extends the baseline research program of the SoLid experiments to a vastly different mass scale of sterile neutrinos. SoLid is well placed for the detection of these states in comparison with older experiments due to the excellent background conditions near the BR2 reactor and the superior instrumentation and analysis techniques employed.

Keywords:NEUTRINOS, ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

Disciplines:Applied mathematics in specific fields, Elementary particle and high energy physics, Nuclear physics, Quantum physics