LSND versus MiniBooNE: Sterile neutrinos with energy dependent masses and mixing?

Abstract

Standard active--sterile neutrino oscillations do not provide a satisfactory description of the LSND evidence for neutrino oscillations together with the constraints from MiniBooNE and other null-result short-baseline oscillation experiments. However, if the mass or the mixing of the sterile neutrino depends in an exotic way on its energy all data become consistent. I explore the phenomenological consequences of the assumption that either the mass or the mixing scales with the neutrino energy as $1/E_{\nu }^r(r>0)$. Since the neutrino energy in LSND is about 40 MeV, whereas MiniBooNE operates at around 1 GeV, oscillations get suppressed in MiniBooNE and the two results become fully compatible for $r\gtrsim 0.2$. Furthermore, also the global fit of all relevant data improves significantly by exploring the different energy regimes of the various experiments. The best fit ${\chi }^2$ decreases by 12.7 (14.1) units with respect to standard sterile neutrino oscillations if the mass (mixing) scales with energy.

18 pages, 3 figures, discussion extended, version to appear in JHEP

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