Abstract
This Letter reports the first measurement of high-energy reactor antineutrinos at Daya Bay, with nearly 9000 inverse beta decay candidates in the prompt energy region of 8–12 MeV observed over 1958 days of data collection. A multivariate analysis is used to separate 2500 signal events from background statistically. The hypothesis of no reactor antineutrinos with neutrino energy above 10 MeV is rejected with a significance of 6.2 standard deviations. A 29% antineutrino flux deficit in the prompt energy region of 8–11 MeV is observed compared to a recent model prediction. We provide the unfolded antineutrino spectrum above 7 MeV as a data-based reference for other experiments. This result provides the first direct observation of the production of antineutrinos from several high- isotopes in commercial reactors.
- Received 17 March 2022
- Revised 5 June 2022
- Accepted 28 June 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.041801
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society