Speaker
Description
DANSS is a one cubic meter highly segmented solid scintillator detector. It consists of 2500 scintillator strips, covered with gadolinium loaded reflective coating and read out with SiPMs via wavelength shifting fibers. DANSS is placed under a 3 GW industrial reactor at the Kalinin NPP (Russia) on a movable platform. The distance from the reactor core center is varied from 10.7 m to 12.7 m on-line. The inverse beta decay (IBD) process is used to detect antineutrinos. DANSS detects about 4000 IBD events per day with the background from cosmic muons at the level of few percent.
Sterile neutrinos are searched for assuming a 4 neutrino model (3 active and 1 sterile neutrino). The exclusion area in the sterile neutrino parameter plane is obtained using a ratio of positron energy spectra collected at different distances. We compare the most robust analysis based on a comparison of antineutrino energy spectra shapes at different distances with the analysis that uses information about the counting rates as well. The talk will cover the analysis of systematic uncertainties and the statistical methods used to obtain exclusion areas.
