Mon·Dec 5, 2016Monday·December 5, 2016

1. 01*

   Reactors as a source of antineutrinos: the effect of fuel loading and burnup for mixed oxide fuels

   Adam Bernstein🇺🇸 · Nathaniel Bowden🇺🇸 · Anna Erickson🇺🇸

   In a conventional light water reactor loaded with a range of uranium and plutonium-based fuel mixtures, the variation in antineutrino production over the cycle reflects both the initial core fissile inventory and its evolution. Under the assumption of constant thermal power, we calculate the rate at which antineutrinos are emitted from variously fueled cores, and the evolution of that rate as measured by a representative ton-scale antineutrino detector. We find that antineutrino flux decreases with burnup for Low Enriched Uranium cores, increases for full mixed-oxide (MOX) cores, and does not appreciably change for cores with a MOX fraction of approximately 75%. Accounting for uncertainties in the fission yields, in the emitted antineutrino spectra, and the detector response function, we show that the difference in core-wide MOX fractions at least as small as 8% can be distinguished using a hypothesis test. The test compares the evolution of the antineutrino rate relative to an initial value over part or all of the cycle. The use of relative rates reduces the sensitivity of the test to an independent thermal power measurement, making the result more robust against possible countermeasures. This rate-only approach also offers the potential advantage of reducing the cost and complexity of the antineutrino detectors used to verify the diversion, compared to methods that depend on the use of the antineutrino spectrum. A possible application is the verification of the disposition of surplus plutonium in nuclear reactors.

   nucl-exnucl-thphysics.ins-detPhys.Rev.Applied(2018)·19 citations
2. 02*

   Precision long-term measurements of beta-decay-rate ratios in a controlled environment

   S. D. Bergeson🇺🇸 · J. B. Peatross🇺🇸 · M. Ware🇺🇸

   We report on measurements of relative beta-decay rates of Na-22, Cl-36, Co-60, Sr-90, Cs-137 monitored for more than one year. The radioactive samples are mounted in an automated sample changer that sequentially positions the five samples in turn, with high spatial precision, in front of each of four Geiger-Müller tubes. The sample wheel, detectors, and associated electronics are housed inside a sealed chamber held at constant absolute pressure, humidity, and temperature to isolate the experiment from environmental variations. The statistical uncertainty in the count rate approaches a few times 0.01% with two weeks of averaging. Other sources of error are on a similar scale. The data are analyzed in variety of ways, comparing count rates of the various samples on one or more detectors, and comparing count rates of a particular sample across multiple detectors. We observe no statistically significant variations in the ratios of decay rates, either annual or at higher-frequency, at a level above 0.01%.

   nucl-exhep-phphysics.ins-detPLB(2017)·3 citations
3. 03*

   Charged pions tagged with polarized photons probing strong CP violation in a chiral-imbalance medium

   Mamiya Kawaguchi🇯🇵 · Masayasu Harada🇯🇵 · Shinya Matsuzaki🇯🇵 · Ruiwen Ouyang🇨🇳

   It is expected that in a hot QCD system, a local parity-odd domain can be produced due to nonzero chirality, which is induced from the difference of winding numbers carried by the gluon topological configuration (QCD sphaleron). This local domain is called the chiral-imbalance medium characterized by nonzero chiral chemical potential, which can be interpreted as the time variation of the strong CP phase. We find that the chiral chemical potential generates the parity breaking term in the electromagnetic form factor of charged pions. Heavy ion collision experiments could observe the phenomenological consequence of this parity-odd form factor through the elastic scattering of a pion and a photon in the medium. Then we quantify the asymmetry rate of the parity violation by measuring the polarization of the photon associated with the pion, and discuss how it could be measured in a definite lab frame. We roughly estimate the typical size of the asymmetry, just by picking up the pion resonant process, and find that the signal can be sufficiently larger than possible background events from parity-breaking electroweak process. Our findings might provide a novel possibility to make a manifest detection for the remnant of the strong CP violation.

   ↳ nucl-thhep-phnucl-exPRC(2017)·12 citations

* Reconstructed cohort: no mailing for this day survives in the archive. Papers are grouped by their submission times and arXiv's announcement cut-off, assuming announcement without delay; positions follow identifier order. Validated at ~91% exact-day agreement against the archived era.