How to measure the reactor neutrino flux below the inverse beta decay threshold with CENS
Jiajun Liao🇨🇳 · Hongkai Liu🇮🇱 · Danny Marfatia🇺🇸
Most antineutrinos produced in a nuclear reactor have energies below the inverse beta decay threshold, and have not yet been detected. We show that a coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering experiment with an ultra-low energy threshold like NUCLEUS can measure the flux of reactor neutrinos below 1.8 MeV. Using a regularized unfolding procedure, we find that a meaningful upper bound can be placed on the low energy flux, but the existence of the neutron capture component cannot be established.