Published in the Physics Review Letter

Evidence of Antineutrinos from Distant Reactors using Pure Water at SNO+

Within the international research group of The SNO+ Collaboration, Queen's Physics department professors, Mark Chen, Ryan Martin, Art McDonald (co-winner of the 2015 Physics Nobel Prize), Alex Wright and a large team of postdocs and students have found that pure water can be used to measure antineutrinos from reactors at large distances.

Paper Abstract:

The SNO+ Collaboration reports the first evidence of reactor antineutrinos in a Cherenkov detector. The nearest nuclear reactors are located 240 km away in Ontario, Canada. This analysis uses events with energies lower than in any previous analysis with a large water Cherenkov detector. Two analytical methods are used to distinguish reactor antineutrinos from background events in 190 days of data and yield consistent evidence for antineutrinos with a combined significance of 3.5σ.

The work is also featured in the Physics Magazine:

Reactor Neutrinos Detected by Water

 
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