Speaker
Description
The Precision Reactor Oscillation and SPECTrum (PROSPECT) experiment is a short-baseline reactor experiment that was located at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), an 85MW highly-enriched uranium reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). A goal of PROSPECT is to measure the absolute neutrino flux, a measurement that is dependent on several detector characteristics and variables that all must be measured at an uncertainty ≤ 1%. One such variable is the proton density of the detector scintillator, as incoming reactor antineutrinos interact with these protons. Traditionally, determination of this value relies on either a known scintillator recipe or the usage of commercial combustion analysis. In this poster, we provide an overview of the antineutrino flux analysis, and propose a new method of scintillator proton density calculation using quantitative nuclear magnetic resonance (qNMR). This technique makes use of NMR spectroscopy by probing a combination of scintillator and test standard using the 1H test nucleus, allowing for direct calculation of the proton content of the scintillator. Preliminary results demonstrate an ability to precisely calculate the proton density of a test material with known composition, with future improvements aiming to bring the result to the ⪅1% uncertainty level desired for the absolute flux measurement.