A Biased Review of Tau Neutrino Mass Limits

Abstract

After a quick review of astrophysically relevant limits, I present a summary of MeV scale tau neutrino mass limits derived from accelerator based experiments. I argue that the current published limits appear to be too consistent, and that we therefore cannot conclude that the tau neutrino mass limit is as low as usually claimed. I provide motivational arguments calling into question the assumed statistical properties of the usual maxumum likelihood estimators, and provide a prescription for deriving a more robust and understandable mass limit.

9 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. To appear in the Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Tau Lepton Physics, Sept 18-21 2000, Victoria (Canada)

References in corpus (2)

• A Limit on the Mass of the ${\nu }_{\tau }$
• An upper limit for the tau-neutrino mass from tau --> 5 pi+- nu_tau decays

Cited by in corpus (1)

• CLEO Contributions to Tau Physics