Statistical Methods Applied to the Search of Sterile Neutrinos

Abstract

The frequentist statistical methods applied to search for short-baseline neutrino oscillations induced by a sterile neutrino with mass at the eV scale are reviewed and compared. The comparison is performed under limit setting and signal discovery scenarios, considering both when an oscillation would enhance the neutrino interaction rate in the detector and when it would reduce it. The sensitivity of the experiments and the confidence regions extracted for specific data sets change considerably according to which test statistic is used and the assumptions on its probability distribution. A standardized analysis approach based on the most general kind of hypothesis test is proposed.

Replaced with the published version. 23 pages, 10 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Improved Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Search and Energy Spectrum Measurement with the PROSPECT Experiment at HFIR
• Statistical significance of the sterile-neutrino hypothesis in the context of reactor and gallium data
• Sterile Neutrinos and the Global Reactor Antineutrino Dataset
• A Statistical Analysis of the COHERENT Data and Applications to New Physics
• Neutrino-4 anomaly: oscillations or fluctuations?
• Improved eV-scale Sterile-Neutrino Constraints from the Second KATRIN Measurement Campaign
• Gallium Anomaly: Critical View from the Global Picture of ${\nu }_e$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_e$ Disappearance
• Statistical interpretation of sterile neutrino oscillation searches at reactors
• Search for Signatures of Sterile Neutrinos with Double Chooz
• Future searches for light sterile neutrinos at nuclear reactors
• Status of Anomalies and Sterile Neutrino Searches at Nuclear Reactors
• Search for Hidden Neutrinos at the European Spallation Source: the SHiNESS experiment
• New physics from oscillations at the DUNE near detector, and the role of systematic uncertainties
• Status and Perspectives of Neutrino Physics