Colloquium with Dr. Logan M. Lebanowski, Physics Researcher, University of California, Berkeley

In a mine in Sudbury, Canada, the SNO+ detector is being readied to search for a so-far-undetected nuclear-decay process. Spotting this rare decay would allow researchers to confirm that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. But while SNO+ team members prepare for that search, they have made another breakthrough by capturing the interaction with water of antineutrinos from nuclear reactors, a first for such a device. The finding offers the possibility of making neutrino detectors from a nontoxic material that is easy to handle and inexpensive to obtain, key factors for use of the technology in detecting low-energy neutrinos and auditing the world’s nuclear reactors.

In this talk, the speaker will present this first identification of reactor antineutrinos in a Cherenkov detector. In about half a year of data, reactor antineutrinos were identified by analytically suppressing the accidental background due to radioactivity by more than four orders of magnitude and by using sideband measurements for the three relevant backgrounds.