Sterile neutrinos beyond LSND at the Neutrino Factory

Abstract

We discuss the effects of one additional sterile neutrino at the Neutrino Factory. Compared to earlier analyses, which have been motivated by LSND results, we do not impose any constraint on the additional mass squared splitting. This means that the additional mass eigenstate could, with small mixings, be located among the known ones, as it is suggested by the recent analysis of cosmological data. We use a self-consistent framework at the Neutrino Factory without any constraints on the new parameters. We demonstrate for a combined short and long baseline setup that near detectors can provide the expected sensitivity at the LSND-motivated Δm_{41}^2-range, while some sensitivity can also be obtained in the region of the atmospheric mass splitting from the long baselines. We point out that limits on such very light sterile neutrinos may also be obtained from a re-analysis of atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillation data, as well as from supernova neutrino observations. In the second part of the analysis, we compare our sensitivity with the existing literature using additional assumptions, such as |Δm_{41}^2| \gg |Δm_{31}^2| leading to averaging of the fast oscillations in the far detectors. We demonstrate that while the Neutrino Factory has excellent sensitivity compared to existing studies using similar assumptions, one has to be very careful interpreting these results for a combined short and long baseline setup where oscillations could occur in the near detectors. We also test the impact of additional ν_τdetectors at the short and long baselines, and we do not find a substantial improvement of the sensitivities.

23 pages with 8 figures and 1 table included. More references added

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Imprints of CP violation induced by sterile neutrinos in T2K data
• Capabilities of long-baseline experiments in the presence of a sterile neutrino
• How to Identify Different New Neutrino Oscillation Physics Scenarios at DUNE
• Lepton-Jets and Low-Mass Sterile Neutrinos at Hadron Colliders
• Prospects and requirements of opaque detectors in accelerator neutrino experiments
• Exploring New Physics from nu_tau events in OPERA
• EUROnu-WP6 2010 Report
• New sources of leptonic CP violation at the DUNE neutrino experiment