New limits on radiative sterile neutrino decays from a search for single photons in neutrino interactions

Abstract

It has been recently shown that excess events observed by the LSND and MiniBooNE neutrino experiments could be interpreted as a signal from the radiative decay of a heavy sterile neutrino ν_h produced in ν_μneutral current-like interactions. If the ν_h exist, it would be also produced by the ν_μbeam from the CERN SPS in the neutrino beam line shielding. The ν_h's would penetrate the shielding and be observed through the decay ν_h -> νγ, followed by the photon conversion into e+e- pair in the active target of the NOMAD detector. The ν_h's could be also produced in the iron of the magnetic spectrometer of the CHORUS detector, located just in front of NOMAD. Considering these two sources of ν_h's we set new constraints on ν_h properties and exclude part of the LSND/MiniBooNE ν_h parameter space using bounds on single photons production in neutrino reactions recently reported by the NOMAD collaboration. We find that broad bands in the parameter space are still open for more sensitive searches for the ν_h in future neutrino experiments.

10 pages, 5 figures. Revised version to appear in PLB. Discussion of dominant NC-like production of ν_h's added

References in corpus (3)

• Resolution of puzzles from the LSND, KARMEN, and MiniBooNE experiments
• Muon Capture Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Properties
• The LSND/MiniBooNe excess events and heavy neutrino from muon and kaon decays

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Event Generators for High-Energy Physics Experiments
• Searching for eV-scale sterile neutrinos with eight years of atmospheric neutrinos at the IceCube neutrino telescope
• Neutrino Up-scattering via the Dipole Portal at Forward LHC Detectors
• Explaining the MiniBooNE Excess Through a Mixed Model of Oscillation and Decay
• Dipole-Coupled Neutrissimo Explanations of the MiniBooNE Excess Including Constraints from MINERvA Data
• Production of heavy sterile neutrinos from vector boson decay at electroweak temperatures
• A novel event generator for the automated simulation of neutrino scattering
• Space-time evolution of heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decays
• Impact of non-standard interactions on neutrino-nucleon scattering
• $B-L$ model with $A_4\times Z_3\times Z_4$ symmetry for $3+1$ active$-$sterile neutrino mixing
• Efficiently Exploring Multi-Dimensional Parameter Spaces Beyond the Standard Model
• A 17 MeV pseudoscalar and the LSND, MiniBooNE and ATOMKI anomalies
• Dirt/Detector/Dump: Complementary BSM production at Short-Baseline Neutrino Facilities
• Enhanced active-sterile neutrino polarizability at the intensity frontier