We investigate the impact of light ($sim$ eV) sterile neutrinos in the long-baseline experiment T2K. We show that, within the 3+1 scheme, for mass-mixing parameters suggested by the short-baseline anomalies, the interference among the sterile and the atmospheric oscillation frequencies induces a new term in the $ u_mu to u_e$ transition probability, which has the same order of magnitude of the standard 3-flavor solar-atmospheric interference term. We show, for the first time, that current T2K data, taken together with the results of the $theta_{13}$-dedicated reactor experiments, are sensitive to two of the three CP-violating phases involved in the 3+1 scheme. Both the standard CP-phase and the new one ($delta_{13} equiv delta$ and $delta_{14}$ in our parameterization choice) tend to have a common best fit value $delta_{13} simeq delta_{14} simeq -pi/2$. Quite intriguingly, the inclusion of sterile neutrino effects leads to better agreement between the two estimates of $theta_{13}$ obtained, respectively, from reactors and T2K, which in the 3-flavor framework are slightly different.
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