Searching for sterile neutrinos in ice

Abstract

Oscillation interpretation of the results from the LSND, MiniBooNE and some other experiments requires existence of sterile neutrino with mass $\sim 1$ eV and mixing with the active neutrinos $|U_{\mu 0}{|}^2\sim (0.02-0.04)$. It has been realized some time ago that existence of such a neutrino affects significantly the fluxes of atmospheric neutrinos in the TeV range which can be tested by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. In view of the first IceCube data release we have revisited the oscillations of high energy atmospheric neutrinos in the presence of one sterile neutrino. Properties of the oscillation probabilities are studied in details for various mixing schemes both analytically and numerically. The energy spectra and angular distributions of the ${\nu }_{\mu }-$events have been computed for the simplest ${\nu }_s-$mass, and ${\nu }_s-{\nu }_{\mu }$ mixing schemes and confronted with the IceCube data. An illustrative statistical analysis of the present data shows that in the ${\nu }_s-$mass mixing case the sterile neutrinos with parameters required by LSND/MiniBooNE can be excluded at about $3\sigma$ level. The ${\nu }_s-{\nu }_{\mu }$ mixing scheme, however, can not be ruled out with currently available IceCube data.

41 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in JHEP. Minor changes from the previous version

References in corpus (5)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Cosmological parameters from combining the Lyman-alpha forest with CMB, galaxy clustering and SN constraints
• Measurement of the atmospheric neutrino energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 400 TeV with IceCube
• Signature of sterile species in atmospheric neutrino data at neutrino telescopes
• Study of TeV Neutrinos with Upward Showering Muons in Super-Kamiokande

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Light Sterile Neutrinos: Models and Phenomenology
• IceCube: Status and Results