0000000000025542
AUTHOR
Birgit Neumair
A high precision calorimeter for hunting the sterile neutrino in the SOX experiment
Abstract A thermal calorimetric apparatus was designed, built and calibrated for measuring the activity of the artificial 144 Ce —144 Pr antineutrino source. This measurement will be performed at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, just before the source insertion in the tunnel under the Borexino detector and a precision better than 1% is required for a disappearance technique measurement in the SOX (Short distance neutrino Oscillation with BoreXino) project. In this work the apparatus is described and the most important results from the calibration measurements are shown, where the final precision of few per thousand is demonstrated.
A calorimeter for the precise determination of the activity of the 144Ce-144Pr anti-neutrino source in the SOX experiment
We describe the design and the performance of a high precision thermal calorimeter, whose purpose was the measurement of the total activity of the 144Ce-144Pr anti-neutrino source of the SOX (Short distance neutrino Oscillation with BoreXino) experiment. SOX aimed at the search for eV-scale sterile neutrinos by means of the Borexino detector at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy and of a very powerful artificial anti-neutrino source located at 8.51 m from the detector center. In order to obtain the required sensitivity, the activity of the source (approximately 150 kCi) had to be known at 1% precision. In this work we report the design of the experimental apparatus and the res…