Evidence for a 5 MeV Spectral Deviation in the Goesgen Reactor Neutrino Oscillation Experiment

Understand

Recent reactor neutrino experiments observe an anomalous excess around 5 MeV in the prompt energy spectra of positrons following the inverse beta decay reaction.

• In this note we suggest that this 5 MeV anomaly was already present in a much earlier experiment, which was carried out in the 1980's at three distances from the 2.8 GW nuclear powerplant at Goesgen, Switzerland.
• In particular we demonstrate with a log-likelihood test performed on the Goesgen data that the no-anomaly hypothesis is disfavored at a level of 3.8 sigma.