Date: 2025-03-28
Neutrinos only have weak couplings with matter – it requires on average hundreds of light years of water to interact once. Detection and studies of neutrinos are therefore formidable experimental challenges. Nuclear reactors provide an intense source of low energy neutrinos, allowing the studies of neutrino elastic scattering with the atomic nucleus at full quantum-mechanical coherency. The TEXONO experiment led by Dr. Henry Tsz King Wong at the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, has proposed in 2005 and since been pursuing this research program with the Kuo-Sheng Reactor Neutrino Laboratory at the Second Nuclear Power Station in Taiwan, pioneering advances in several generations of novel germanium ionization detectors with increasing sensitivities at lower energy. No excesses of neutrino events were observed from data taken prior to the Reactor decommissioning in 2023. New upper limit of 4.7 times the Standard Model predicted cross-sections was placed. The research was published on March 27, 2025 in Physical Review Letters, sets the stage of imminent positive observation with the next-generation detectors, and opens the windows of sensitive searches of new physics.
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