Active to sterile neutrino oscillations: Coherence and MINOS results

Abstract

We study the ${\nu }_{\mu }-{\nu }_s$ oscillation effects in the near detector of the MINOS experiment. Conceptually, the MINOS search for sterile neutrinos with mass $\sim 1$ eV realizes an interesting situation of partial decoherence of the neutrino state at the production. This corresponds to a difference of energies of the two mass eigenstates that is comparable with or bigger than the width of the initial state (pion). We show that these effects modify the MINOS bound on mixing of sterile neutrino for $Δm^2_{41} \aprge 0.5$ eV${}^2$ and make the experiment insensitive to oscillations with $\Delta m_{41}^2\gtrsim 15$ eV${}^2$. Oscillations with $\Delta m_{41}^2=(1-3)$ eV${}^2$ could explain some deficit of events observed in the low energy bins in the near detector and correspondingly the excess of events in the far detector.

17 pages, 7 figures. Published version

References in corpus (5)

• Event Excess in the MiniBooNE Search for ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }\to {\bar{\nu }}_e$ Oscillations
• Active to sterile neutrino mixing limits from neutral-current interactions in MINOS
• Coherence and oscillations of cosmic neutrinos
• Sterile neutrinos beyond LSND at the Neutrino Factory
• The NuMI Beam at FNAL and its use for Cross Section Measurements

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Sterile Neutrino Oscillations: The Global Picture
• Light sterile neutrinos
• Search for Sterile Neutrinos Mixing with Muon Neutrinos in MINOS
• MeV-scale sterile neutrino decays at the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino program
• A framework for testing leptonic unitarity by neutrino oscillation experiments
• Light Sterile Neutrinos: Status and Perspectives
• Neutrino production coherence and oscillation experiments
• Dynamical Pion Collapse and the Coherence of Conventional Neutrino Beams
• Light Sterile Neutrinos and Short Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Anomalies
• Wave-packet treatment of neutrino oscillations and its implications on determining the neutrino mass hierarchy
• Joint short- and long-baseline constraints on light sterile neutrinos
• Searching for sterile neutrinos from $\pi$ and $K$ decays
• Quantum field theoretic approach to neutrino oscillations in matter
• Decoherence effects in reactor and Gallium neutrino oscillation experiments -- a QFT approach
• Atmospheric neutrinos as a probe of eV^2-scale active-sterile oscillations
• The Liouville equation for flavour evolution of neutrinos and neutrino wave packets
• Studying the neutrino wave-packet effects at medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments and the potential benefits of an extra detector
• MINOS Search for Sterile Neutrinos
• Checking T and CPT violation with sterile neutrino