Sterile neutrino oscillations after first MiniBooNE results

By M. Maltoni, T. Schwetz. 2007

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In view of the recent results from the MiniBooNE experiment we revisit the global neutrino oscillation fit to short-baseline neutrino data by adding one or two sterile neutrinos with eV-scale masses to the three Standard Model neutrinos, and for the first time we consider also the global fit with three sterile neutrinos. Four-neutrino oscillations of the (3+1) type have been only marginally allowed before the recent MiniBooNE results, and become even more disfavored with the new data (at the level of 4�). In the framework of so-called (3+2) five-neutrino mass schemes we find severe tension between appearance and disappearance experiments at the level of more than 3�, and hence no satistfactory fit to the global data is possible in (3+2) schemes. This tension remains also when a third sterile neutrino is added, and the quality of the global fit does not improve significantly in a (3+3) scheme. It should be noted, however, that in models with more than one sterile neutrino the MiniBooNE results are in perfect agreement with the LSND appearance evidence, thanks to the possibility of CP violation available in such oscillation schemes. Furthermore, if disappearance data are not taken into account (3+2) oscillations provide an excellent fit to the full MiniBooNE spectrum including the event excess at low energies.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b5393075e81c65007f4103ac5e25d892bf236ff

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. T. Schwetz
2. M. Maltoni
3. C. Giunti
4. Joachim Kopp
5. P. Machado
6. Stefano Gariazzo
7. Yufeng Li
8. M. Laveder

Citations in the corpus

• The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment: Exploring Fundamental Symmetries of the Universe (2013, methodology): “Recently, the MiniBooNE experiment reported that its antineutrino data might be consistent with the LSND νμ → νe oscillation with ∆m2 ∼ eV2 [300].”
• The Search for Heavy Majorana Neutrinos (2009, background): “See also the implications of the recent results from the MiniBooNE collaboration [65, 66].”
• Sterile neutrino oscillations: the global picture (2013, methodology): “The 3+1 SBL appearance probability does not depend on complex phases, whereas in the 3+2 scheme CP violation via complex phases is possible at SBL [33, 60].”
• Double Beta Decay, Majorana Neutrinos, and Neutrino Mass (2007, background): “Whether models with 3 active neutrinos and 2 or more sterile neutrinos can explain both sets of data is still being investigated (e.g. Maltoni and Schwetz (2007)).”
• Sterile Neutrino Fits to Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Measurements (2012, background): “While groups [20, 23, 24] have explored fits with two sterile neutrinos in the past, the fits presented here represent an important step forward.”
• Global Analyses of Neutrino Oscillation Experiments (2015, unknown): “The new qualitative feature in those 5-neutrino schemes is CP violation at the E/L ∼ eV2 scale [76,77], which introduces some freedom in fitting neutrino versus anti-neutrino data from LSND and MiniBooNE together.”
• Updated global 3+1 analysis of short-baseline neutrino oscillations (2017, methodology): “We consider the constraints obtained from the CDHSW experiment [120], from the analysis [121] of the data of atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments, from the analysis of the SciBooNE-MiniBooNE neutrino [122] and antineutrino [123] data, which were included in our previous fits [12, 33, 38].”