Neutrinos have been one of the most interesting particles to study for the best part of the last century. Ever since the first discovery of... Show moreNeutrinos have been one of the most interesting particles to study for the best part of the last century. Ever since the first discovery of neutrinos, various experiments using both natural and artificial neutrino sources have helped in determining the nature of neutrinos. In particular, experiments in the last two decades helped determine the neutrino oscillation parameters. Although three neutrino picture is well established, discrepancies have been observed in some recent reactor, accelerator, and source neutrino experiments hinting at the existence of a fourth weakly non-interacting neutrino called a sterile neutrino. Additional experimental investigation is needed to test the sterile neutrino hypothesis and identify the source of discrepancies. PROSPECT is a short-baseline reactor antineutrino experiment designed to search for sterile neutrinos and make a precise measurement of 235U reactor antineutrino spectrum from the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory located in Tennessee. The PROSPECT detector is segmented with 6Li-loaded liquid scintillator as the target. The design and development of the PROSPECT detector started in 2014 and the assembly and installation have finished by early 2018. PROSPECT detector has been collecting data since March 2018. The design, development, and installation of the detector is discussed with a particular emphasis on the components designed and developed at Illinois Institute of Technology. The detector calibration, event reconstruction, and data quality are also discussed. Finally, the sterile neutrino search using 33 days of reactor on data and 29 days of reactor off data is presented. Show less
