Light sterile neutrinos: models and phenomenology

By J. Barry, W. Rodejohann, He Zhang. 2011

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivated by recent hints in particle physics and cosmology, we study the realization of eV-scale sterile neutrinos within both the seesaw mechanism and flavor symmetry theories. We show that light sterile neutrinos can rather easily be accommodated in the popular A4 flavor symmetry models. The exact tri-bimaximal mixing pattern is perturbed due to active-sterile mixing, which we discuss in detail for one example. In addition, we find an interesting extension of the type I seesaw, which can provide a natural origin for eV-scale sterile neutrinos as well as visible admixtures between sterile and active neutrinos. We also show that the presence of sterile neutrinos would significantly change the observables in neutrino experiments, specifically the oscillation probabilities in short-baseline experiments and the effective mass in neutrino-less double beta decay. The latter can prove particularly helpful in strengthening the case for eV-scale sterile neutrinos.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7247be554021d89d44392fd850857623c00cf0c2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Neutrinoless double beta decay versus other probes of heavy sterile neutrinos (2019, unknown): “[34, 129, 130].”
Sterile neutrinos in cosmology (2017, background): “Another class of models include the extended seesaw mechanism, where a singlet fermion from a supersymmetric model can produce light sterile neutrinos [76, 77, 78, 79].”
Sterile neutrino oscillations: the global picture (2013, methodology): “Implications of sterile neutrinos for neutrino-less double beta-decay have been discussed recently in [48–50].”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, methodology): “We will in the following consider the minimal extended seesaw [174, 774] (nS = 1 and nR = 3) for simplicity, which leads to one massless (active) neutrino.”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “Some ideas on the origin of a low seesaw scale can be found in [60–71], see also [72].”
Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay: 2015 Review (2016, unknown): “, [57–59]).”
New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars (2013, background): “J C A P 0 3 ( 2 0 1 4 ) 0 2 8 neutrinos thereby range from the application of the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism [19–21], over flavour symmetries [22–24], extra dimensions [25–27], extensions of the seesaw mechanism [21, 28–34], composite neutrinos [35, 36], global symmetries [37, 38], loop suppressions”
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND): Observational Phenomenology and Relativistic Extensions (2011, background): “Such a large mass violates experimental constraints on the ordinary neutrino mass [234], but it may be possible to have a sterile neutrino with a mass in that ballpark [26].”