Search for a sterile neutrino using RENO and NEOS data

Abstract

In the Standard Model of particle physics neutrinos do not have right-handed states. The right-handed neutrinos are called sterile neutrinos because they are not involved in the Standard Model interactions. Reactors are good sources of antineutrinos, and many experiments are conducted to measure various properties of reactor antineutrinos. Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation (RENO) and Neutrino Experiment for Oscillation at Short baseline (NEOS) are carried out at Hanbit Nuclear Power Plant at Younggwang, Korea. Both RENO and NEOS experiments are utilizing liquid scintillator detectors to observe inverse beta decays of electron antineutrinos off protons in the detectors. RENO is equipped with two identical detectors located at 290m and 1380m from the center of the reactor array. A NEOS detector is located at 23.7m away from a reactor core. As the two experiments are using the same neutrino sources from a power plant complex, it might be interesting to study if these experimental setups can provide a hint for an existence of sterile neutrino. In this thesis, we report a systematic study to explore the presence of the sterile neutrinos by comparing the RENO and the NEOS data samples.