KATRIN Sensitivity to Sterile Neutrino Mass in the Shadow of Lightest Neutrino Mass

Abstract

The presence of light sterile neutrinos would strongly modify the energy spectrum of the Tritium β-electrons. We perform an analysis of the KATRIN experiment's sensitivity by scanning almost all the allowed region of neutrino mass-squared difference and mixing angles of the 3+1 scenario. We consider the effect of the unknown absolute mass scale of active neutrinos on the sensitivity of KATRIN to the sterile neutrino mass. We show that after 3 years of data-taking, the KATRIN experiment can be sensitive to mixing angles as small as sin^2 (2θ_s) ~ 10^-2. Particularly we show that for small mixing angles, sin^2 (2θ_s) < 0.1, the KATRIN experiment can gives the strongest limit on active-sterile mass-squared difference.

4 pages, 2 figures, matches the published version

References in corpus (5)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Phenomenology with Massive Neutrinos
• Statistical Significance of the Gallium Anomaly
• Short-Baseline Electron Neutrino Disappearance, Tritium Beta Decay and Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay
• Detecting sterile neutrinos with KATRIN like experiments

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Sterile Neutrinos
• Direct Measurements of Neutrino Mass
• Neutrinos in Large Extra Dimensions and Short-Baseline ${\nu }_e$ Appearance
• Signatures of Extra Dimensional Sterile Neutrinos
• Bound on 3+1 active-sterile neutrino mixing from the first four-week science run of KATRIN
• CP-Invariance Violation at Short-Baseline Experiments in 3+1 Neutrino Scenarios
• Light Sterile Neutrinos in Particle Physics: Experimental Status