Capabilities of long-baseline experiments in the presence of a sterile neutrino

Abstract

Assuming that there is a sterile neutrino, we ask what then is the ability of long-baseline experiments to i) establish that neutrino oscillation violates CP, ii) determine the three-neutrino mass ordering, and iii) determine which CP-violating phase or phases are the cause of any CP violation that may be observed. We find that the ability to establish CP violation and to determine the mass ordering could be very substantial. However, the effects of the sterile neutrino could be quite large, and it might prove very difficult to determine which phase is responsible for an observed CP violation. We explain why a sterile neutrino changes the long-baseline sensitivities to CP violation and to the mass ordering in the ways that it does. We note that long-baseline experiments can probe the presence of sterile neutrinos in a way that is different from, and complementary to, the probes of short-baseline experiments. We explore the question of how large sterile-active mixing angles need to be before long-baseline experiments can detect their effects, or how small they need to be before the interpretation of these experiments can safely disregard the possible existence of sterile neutrinos.

Published in JHEP, 24 pages, 12 figures, IH results added

References in corpus (16)

• Observation of electron-antineutrino disappearance at Daya Bay
• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation by the K2K Experiment
• New features in the simulation of neutrino oscillation experiments with GLoBES 3.0
• Updated fit to three neutrino mixing: status of leptonic CP violation
• Neutrino oscillations refitted
• $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric indices and the four-dimensional A-model
• Non-standard neutrino interactions in reactor and superbeam experiments
• Fundamental Physics at the Intensity Frontier
• Search for a Light Sterile Neutrino at Daya Bay
• Imprints of CP violation induced by sterile neutrinos in T2K data
• Potential of optimized NOvA for large theta(13) & combined performance with a LArTPC & T2K
• Sterile neutrinos beyond LSND at the Neutrino Factory
• Signatures of heavy sterile neutrinos at long baseline experiments
• Minimal 3+2 sterile neutrino model at LBNE
• Status of Neutrino Mass and Mixing

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Sterile Neutrinos
• Physics with Beam Tau-Neutrino Appearance at DUNE
• How to Identify Different New Neutrino Oscillation Physics Scenarios at DUNE
• The Impact of Different Parameterizations on the Interpretation of CP Violation in Neutrino Oscillations
• PROSPECT-II Physics Opportunities
• Prospects of light sterile neutrino searches in long-baseline neutrino oscillations
• Study of light sterile neutrino at the long-baseline experiment options at KM3NeT
• New limits on neutrino non-standard mixings based on prescribed singular values
• What measurements of neutrino neutral current events can reveal
• Improved sensitivities of ESS$\nu$SB from a two-detector fit
• Prospects and requirements of opaque detectors in accelerator neutrino experiments
• Light sterile neutrinos and their implications on currently running long-baseline and neutrinoless double beta decay experiments
• Exploring the new physics phases in 3+1 scenario in neutrino oscillation experiments
• Signals of eV-scale sterile neutrino at long baseline neutrino experiments
• Sterile sector impacting the correlations and degeneracies among mixing parameters at the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment
• New sources of leptonic CP violation at the DUNE neutrino experiment