Searches for sterile neutrinos at very short baseline reactor experiments

Abstract

For a long time there were 3 main experimental indications in favor of the existence of sterile neutrinos: $\overline{{\nu }_e}$ appearance in the $\overline{{\nu }_{\mu }}$ beam in the LSND experiment, $\overline{{\nu }_e}$ flux deficit in comparison with theoretical expectations in reactor experiments, and ${\nu }_e$ deficit in calibration runs with radioactive sources in the Ga solar neutrino experiments SAGE and GALEX. All three problems can be explained by the existence of sterile neutrinos with the mass square difference in the ballpark of $1\mathrm{e}{\mathrm{V}}^2$. Recently the MiniBooNE collaboration observed electron (anti)neutrino appearance in the muon (anti)neutrino beams. The significance of the effect reaches 6.0$\sigma$ level when combined with the LSND result. Even more recently the NEUTRINO-4 collaboration claimed the observation of $\overline{{\nu }_e}$ oscillations to sterile neutrinos with a significance slightly higher than 3$\sigma$. If these results are confirmed, New Physics beyond the Standard Model would be required. More than 10 experiments are devoted to searches of sterile neutrinos. Six very short baseline reactor experiments are taking data just now. We review the present results and perspectives of these experiments.

Talk at the 4th International Conference on Particle Physics and Astrophysics (ICPPA-2018), Moscow, Russia

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• Limits on Active to Sterile Neutrino Oscillations from Disappearance Searches in the MINOS, Daya Bay, and Bugey-3 Experiments

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Statistical significance of the sterile-neutrino hypothesis in the context of reactor and gallium data
• Neutrino-4 anomaly: oscillations or fluctuations?
• Sterile Neutrino Searches with MicroBooNE: Electron Neutrino Disappearance
• Gallium Anomaly: Critical View from the Global Picture of ${\nu }_e$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_e$ Disappearance
• Search for Signatures of Sterile Neutrinos with Double Chooz
• Review of sterile neutrino searches at very short-baseline reactor experiments
• Improved sensitivities of ESS$\nu$SB from a two-detector fit
• Baseline and other effects for a sterile neutrino at DUNE
• Status and Perspectives of Neutrino Physics
• Neutrino Masses from the Point of View of Economy and Simplicity