Queen's 2015 Nobel Prize in PhysicsPublished 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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