New parameter region in sterile neutrino searches: a scenario to alleviate cosmological neutrino mass bound and its testability at oscillation experiments

Abstract

Recent high-precision cosmological data tighten the bound to neutrino masses and start rising a tension to the results of lab-experiment measurements, which may hint new physics in the role of neutrinos during the structure formation in the universe. A scenario with massless sterile neutrinos was proposed to alleviate the cosmological bound and recover the concordance in the measurements of neutrino masses. We revisit the scenario and discuss its testability at oscillation experiments. We find that the scenario is viable with a large active-sterile mixing that is testable at oscillation experiments. We present a numerical estimation of the sensitivity reach of the IceCube atmospheric neutrino observation to a sterile neutrino with a mass lighter than active neutrinos for the first time. IceCube shows a good sensitivity to the active-sterile mixing at the mass-square difference with a size of $\sim 0.1$ eV${}^2$ in the case of the \textit{inverted-mass-ordering sterile neutrino}, which is forbidden under the assumption of the standard cosmology but is allowed thanks to the alleviation of the cosmological bound in this scenario.

9 pages, 2 eps figures; v2: published version, added references

References in corpus (24)

• In the Realm of the Hubble tension $-$ a Review of Solutions
• Cosmology Intertwined III: $f{\sigma }_8$ and $S_8$
• NuFit-6.0: Updated global analysis of three-flavor neutrino oscillations
• Unitarity of the Leptonic Mixing Matrix
• Non-unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix: Present bounds and future sensitivities
• Toward the discovery of matter creation with neutrinoless double-beta decay
• Sterile Neutrinos
• Light Sterile Neutrinos: Models and Phenomenology
• Updated Cosmological Constraints in Extended Parameter Space with Planck PR4, DESI Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, and Supernovae: Dynamical Dark Energy, Neutrino Masses, Lensing Anomaly, and the Hubble Tension
• Direct Measurements of Neutrino Mass
• Neutrino cosmology after DESI: tightest mass upper limits, preference for the normal ordering, and tension with terrestrial observations
• Signature of sterile species in atmospheric neutrino data at neutrino telescopes
• Searching for sterile neutrinos in ice
• Snowmass White Paper: Beyond the Standard Model effects on Neutrino Flavor
• Massive neutrinos and cosmic composition
• Neutrino Masses from a Dark Neutrino Sector below the Electroweak Scale
• Searches for sterile neutrinos with IceCube DeepCore
• How to relax the cosmological neutrino mass bound
• Quantifying the tension between cosmological and terrestrial constraints on neutrino masses
• Global view of neutrino interactions in cosmology: The freestreaming window as seen by Planck
• Very Light Sterile Neutrinos at NOvA and T2K
• Constraining super-light sterile neutrinos at Borexino and KamLAND
• Impact of nuclear matrix element calculations for current and future neutrinoless double beta decay searches
• Sterile Neutrinos: Propagation in Matter and Sensitivity to Sterile Mass Ordering

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Invisible neutron decay and light BSM particles