Search for Hidden Neutrinos at the European Spallation Source: the SHiNESS experiment
Résumé
The upcoming European Spallation Source (ESS) will soon provide the most intense neutrino source in the world. We propose the Search for Hidden Neutrinos at the ESS (SHiNESS) experiment, highlighting its unique opportunities to search for the existence of sterile neutrinos across a wide range of scales: anomalous oscillations at short baselines; non-unitarity mixing in the active neutrino sector; or an excess of events with multiple leptons in the final state, produced in the decay of heavy neutrinos. The baseline design of the detector comprises a tank filled with 42 ton of liquid scintillator, located 25 m far from the ESS beam target. We show that SHiNESS will be able to considerably improve current global limits for the three cases outlined above. Although in this work we focus on new physics in the neutrino sector, the proposed setup may also be used to search for signals from weakly interacting particles in a broader context.
Mots clés
neutrino/mu: secondary beam
antineutrino/mu: secondary beam
detector: design
particle: interaction
neutrino: heavy: decay
scintillation counter: liquid
neutrino: particle source
neutrino: sterile
n: fission
lepton: multiple production
neutrino: mixing
new physics: search for
neutrino: oscillation
proposed experiment