Testing the very-short-baseline neutrino anomalies at the solar sector

Abstract

Motivated by the accumulating hints of new sterile neutrino species at the eV scale, we explore the consequences of such an hypothesis on the solar sector phenomenology. After introducing the theoretical formalism needed to describe the MSW conversion of solar neutrinos in the presence of one (or more) sterile neutrino state(s) located "far" from the (nu_1,nu_2) "doublet", we perform a quantitative analysis of the available experimental results, focusing on the electron neutrino mixing. We find that the present data posses a sensitivity to the amplitude of the lepton mixing matrix element U_e4 --- encoding the admixture of the electron neutrino with a new mass eigenstate --- which is comparable to that achieved on the standard matrix element U_e3. In addition, and more importantly, our analysis evidences that, in a 4-flavor framework, the current preference for |U_e3|>0 is indistinguishable from that for |U_e4|>0, having both a similar statistical significance (which is ~ 1.3 sigma adopting the old reactor fluxes determinations, and ~ 1.8 sigma using their new estimates). We also point out that, differently from the standard 3-flavor case, in a 3+1 scheme the Dirac CP-violating phases cannot be eliminated from the description of solar neutrino conversions.

16 pages, 3 figures; minor changes; matches version published in PRD

References in corpus (10)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Phenomenology with Massive Neutrinos
• Sterile neutrino oscillations after first MiniBooNE results
• Cosmology seeking friendship with sterile neutrinos
• 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
• Possible CP-Violation effects in core-collapse Supernovae
• Contrasting solar and reactor neutrinos with a non-zero value of theta13
• Hint of non-standard dynamics in solar neutrino conversion
• Large Short-Baseline antinu_mu Disappearance

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Light Sterile Neutrinos: Models and Phenomenology
• Imprints of CP violation induced by sterile neutrinos in T2K data
• Solar neutrino physics with low-threshold dark matter detectors
• Testing sterile neutrino mixing with present and future solar neutrino data
• Neutrino-4 anomaly: oscillations or fluctuations?
• Sterile Neutrino Shape-shifting Caused by Dark Matter
• Gallium Anomaly: Critical View from the Global Picture of ${\nu }_e$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_e$ Disappearance
• Joint short- and long-baseline constraints on light sterile neutrinos
• The Sun: Light Dark Matter and Sterile Neutrinos
• Neutron Tagging Can Greatly Reduce Spallation Backgrounds in Super-Kamiokande
• Baseline and other effects for a sterile neutrino at DUNE
• The Sterile-Active Neutrino Flavor Model: the Imprint of Dark Matter on the Electron Neutrino Spectra