Searching for eV-scale sterile neutrinos with eight years of atmospheric neutrinos at the IceCube neutrino telescope

Abstract

We report in detail on searches for eV-scale sterile neutrinos, in the context of a 3+1 model, using eight years of data from the IceCube neutrino telescope. By analyzing the reconstructed energies and zenith angles of 305,735 atmospheric ${\nu }_{\mu }$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$ events we construct confidence intervals in two analysis spaces: ${\sin }^2(2{\theta }_{24})$ vs. $\Delta m_{41}^2$ under the conservative assumption ${\theta }_{34}=0$; and ${\sin }^2(2{\theta }_{24})$ vs. ${\sin }^2(2{\theta }_{34})$ given sufficiently large $\Delta m_{41}^2$ that fast oscillation features are unresolvable. Detailed discussions of the event selection, systematic uncertainties, and fitting procedures are presented. No strong evidence for sterile neutrinos is found, and the best-fit likelihood is consistent with the no sterile neutrino hypothesis with a p-value of 8\% in the first analysis space and 19\% in the second.

This long-form paper is a companion to the letter "An eV-scale sterile neutrino search using eight years of atmospheric muon neutrino data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory". v2: update other experiments contours on results plot

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