Double Chooz Project: Status of a Reactor Experiment Aimed at Searches for Neutrino Oscillations

摘要

Double Chooz is an experiment that is devoted to searches for reactor-antineutrino oscillations at the CHOOZ nuclear power plant. This project is aimed at measuring the unknown mixing angle θ_(13). It is assumed that the value of θ_(13) will be extracted from an analysis of the distortion of the antineutrino spectra obtained in relative measurements at two distances from the nuclear reactors by means of two identical detectors. The method makes it possible to minimize systematic errors of the experiment and to improve the sensitivity to the sought parameter. To date, the most stringent constraint on the parameter θ_(13) was obtained from the CHOOZ experiment in 1995-1997 [sin~2(2θ_(13))＜0.19., with the difference of the squares of the neutrino masses being Δ_(13)~2 = 2.5x10~(-3) eV~2].