English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The Coulomb enhancement of low energy electrons in nuclear beta decaygenerates sharp cutoffs in the accompanying antineutrino spectrum at the betadecay endpoint energies. It has been conjectured that these features willinterfere with measuring the effect of a neutrino mass hierarchy on anoscillated nuclear reactor antineutrino spectrum. These sawtooth-like featureswill appear in detailed reactor antineutrino spectra, with characteristicenergy scales similar to the oscillation period critical to neutrino masshierarchy determination near a 53 km baseline. However, these sawtooth-likedistortions are found to contribute at a magnitude of only a few percentrelative to the mass hierarchy-dependent oscillation pattern in Fourier space.In the Fourier cosine and sine transforms, the features that encode a neutrinomass hierarchy dominate by over sixteen (thirty-three) times in prominence tothe maximal contribution of the sawtooth-like distortions from the detailedenergy spectrum, given $3.2\%/\sqrt{E_\mathrm{vis.}/\mathrm{MeV}}$ (perfect)detector energy resolution. The effect of these distortions is shown to benegligible even when the uncertainties in the reactor spectrum, oscillationparameters, and counting statistics are considered. This result is shown tohold even when the opposite hierarchy oscillation patterns are nearlydegenerate in energy space, if energy response nonlinearities are controlled tobelow 0.5\%. Therefore with accurate knowledge of detector energy response, thesawtooth-like features in reactor antineutrino spectra will not significantlyimpede neutrino mass hierarchy measurements using reactor antineutrinos.

Reactor Neutrino Spectral Distortions Play Little Role in Mass Hierarchy Experiments