Speaker
Dr
Viacheslav Egorov
(Joint Institute for Nuclear Research)
Description
The common JINR (Dubna) - ITEP (Moscow) project DANSS is aimed at creating a relatively compact neutrino spectrometer which does not contain any flammable or other dangerous liquids and may therefore be located very close to the core of an industrial power reactor. As a result, high neutrino flux provides about 15,000 IBD interactions per day in the detector with a sensitive volume of 1 m$^3$. High segmentation of the plastic scintillator allows to suppress a background down to a $\sim$1% level. Numerous tests performed with a simplified pilot prototype DANSSino under a 3 GW$_{\rm th}$ reactor WWER-1000 of the Kalinin NPP have demonstrated operability of the chosen design.
The DANSS detector surrounded with a composite shield is movable on-line by means of a special lifting gear, varying the distance to the reactor core in a range from 9.7 m to 12.2 m. Due to this feature, it is used not only for the reactor monitoring, but also for fundamental research including short-range neutrino oscillations to the sterile state. Supposing one-year measurement, the sensitivity to the oscillation parameters is expected to reach a level of $\sin^2(2\theta_{\rm new})\sim5\times10^{-3}$ with $\Delta m^2 \subset (0.02-5.0)$ eV$^2$.
Operation of the DANSS detector has been started in January 2016. The report will contain description of the spectrometer and the first preliminary results got in few months.
Primary author
Dr
Viacheslav Egorov
(Joint Institute for Nuclear Research)
