Reactor antineutrino anomaly reanalysis in context of inverse-square law violation

Abstract

We discuss a possibility that the so-called reactor antineutrino anomaly (RAA), which is a deficit of the v̄e rates in the reactor experiments in comparison to the theoretical expectations, can at least in part be explained by applying a quantum field-theoretical approach to neutrino oscillations, which in particular predicts a small deviation from the classical inverse-square law at short (but still macroscopic) distances between the neutrino source and detector. An extensive statistical analysis of the current reactor data on the integrated v̄e event rates vs. baseline is performed to examine this speculation. The obtained results are applied to study another long-standing puzzle—gallium neutrino anomaly (GNA), which is a missing νe flux from37Ar and51Cr electron-capture decays as measured by the gallium–germanium solar neutrino detectors GALLEX and SAGE.