Searches for sterile neutrinos with NOvA

Journal Article · Tue Nov 15 00:00:00 EST 2016 · PoS Proceedings of Science

OSTI ID:1353463

Davies, Gavin S. ^[1]; Aurisano, Adam ^[2]; Kafka, Gareth K. ^[3]; Kasetti, Siva ^[4]; Keloth, Rijeesh ^[5]; Sousa, Alex ^[2]; Suter, Louise ^[6]; Yang, Shaokai ^[2]

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1. Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN (United States)
2. Univ. of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH (United States)
3. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
4. Univ. of Hyderabad (India)
5. Cochin Univ. of Science and Technology (India)
6. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)

Contradictory evidence has been presented on the issue of neutrino mixing between the three known active neutrinos and light sterile neutrino species. Apparent short-baseline neutrino oscillations observed by the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments, the collective evidence of the reactor neutrino anomaly, and the gallium anomaly all point towards sterile neutrinos with mass at the 1 eV level. While these results are tantalizing, they are not conclusive as they are in tension with null results from other short-baseline experiments, and with disappearance searches in longbaseline and atmospheric experiments. The NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis v_e Appearance) experiment may help clarify the situation by searching for disappearance of active neutrinos from the NuMI (Neutrinos from the Main Injector) beam over a baseline of 810 km. We describe the method used by NOvA to look for oscillations into sterile neutrinos at the Far Detector (FD) through the disappearance of neutral-current (NC) neutrino events, including preliminary results of this search. In addition, the Near Detector (ND) is well suited for searching for anomalous short-baseline oscillations and probing the LSND and MiniBooNE sterile neutrino allowed regions using a variety of final states. We also present a novel method for selecting samples with high purity at the ND using convolutional neural networks. Furthermore, based on this method, the sensitivity to anomalous short-baseline nt appearance are shown, and searches for anomalous v_e appearance and v_μ disappearance at the NOvA ND are presented.

• Research Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-07CH11359
• OSTI ID: 1353463
• Report Number(s): FERMILAB-CONF-16-673-ND; 1596816
• Journal Information: PoS Proceedings of Science, Vol. ICHEP2016; ISSN 1824-8039
• Publisher: SISSA
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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