Signatures of heavy sterile neutrinos at long baseline experiments
- Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400005 (India)
Sterile neutrinos with masses {approx}0.1 eV or higher, allowed with the current oscillation data, can potentially play an important role in astrophysics and cosmology. We explore possible signatures of such sterile neutrinos at long baseline experiments. We determine the neutrino conversion probabilities analytically in a 4-neutrino framework, including matter effects, treating the sterile mixing angles {theta}{sub 14}, {theta}{sub 24}, {theta}{sub 34}, the deviation of {theta}{sub 23} from maximality, as well as {theta}{sub 13} and the ratio {delta}m{sub {center_dot}}{sup 2}/{delta}m{sub atm}{sup 2} as small parameters for a perturbative expansion. This gives rise to analytically tractable expressions for flavor conversion probabilities from which effects of these parameters can be clearly understood. We numerically calculate the signals at a neutrino factory with near and far detectors that can identify the lepton charge, and point out observables that can discern the sterile mixing signals. We find that clean identification of sterile mixing would be possible for {theta}{sub 24}{theta}{sub 34} > or approx. 0.005 (3{sigma}) and {theta}{sub 14} > or approx. 0.06 rad (3{sigma}) with the current bound of {theta}{sub 13}<0.2 rad; a better {theta}{sub 13} bound would allow probing smaller values of sterile mixing. We also generalize the formalism for any number of sterile neutrinos, and demonstrate that only certain combinations of sterile mixing parameters are relevant irrespective of the number of sterile neutrinos. This also leads to a stringent test of the scenario with multiple sterile neutrinos that currently is able to describe all the data from the short baseline experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE.
- OSTI ID:
- 21023906
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 76, Issue 11; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.76.113001; (c) 2007 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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