Impact of Wave Packet Separation in Low-Energy Sterile Neutrino Searches

Abstract

Light sterile neutrinos have been motivated by anomalies observed in short-baseline neutrino experiments.Among them, radioactive-source and reactor experiments have provided evidence and constraints, respectively, for electron neutrino disappearance compatible with an eV-scale neutrino. The results from these observations are seemingly in conflict. This letter brings into focus the assumption that the neutrino wave packet can be approximated as a plane wave, which is adopted in all analyses of such experiments. We demonstrate that the damping of oscillations, e.g., due to a finite wave packet size, solve the tension between these electron-flavor observations and constraints.

7 pages, 4 figures in the main text. Supplemental material with additional details. Updated version to match PRD published version, added link to code