No Arabic abstract
Light sterile neutrinos can be probed in a number of ways, including electroweak decays, cosmology and neutrino oscillation experiments. At long-baseline experiments, the neutral-current data is directly sensitive to the presence of light sterile neutrinos: once the active neutrinos have oscillated into a sterile state, a depletion in the neutral-current data sample is expected since they do not interact with the $Z$ boson. This channel offers a direct avenue to probe the mixing between a sterile neutrino and the tau neutrino, which remains largely unconstrained by current data. In this work, we study the potential of the DUNE experiment to constrain the mixing angle which parametrizes this mixing, $theta_{34}$, through the observation of neutral-current events at the far detector. We find that DUNE will be able to improve significantly over current constraints thanks to its large statistics and excellent discrimination between neutral- and charged-current events.
We investigate the potential for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to probe the existence and effects of a fourth neutrino mass-eigenstate. We study the mixing of the fourth mass-eigenstate with the three active neutrinos of the Standard Model, including the effects of new sources of CP-invariance violation, for a wide range of new mass-squared differences, from lower than 10^-5 eV^2 to higher than 1 eV^2. DUNE is sensitive to previously unexplored regions of the mixing angle - mass-squared difference parameter space. If there is a fourth neutrino, in some regions of the parameter space, DUNE is able to measure the new oscillation parameters (some very precisely) and clearly identify two independent sources of CP-invariance violation. Finally, we use the hypothesis that there are four neutrino mass-eigenstates in order to ascertain how well DUNE can test the limits of the three-massive-neutrinos paradigm. In this way, we briefly explore whether light sterile neutrinos can serve as proxies for other, in principle unknown, phenomena that might manifest themselves in long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments.
Even though neutrino oscillations have been conclusively established, there are a few unanswered questions pertaining to leptonic Charge Parity violation (CPV), mass hierarchy (MH) and $theta_{23}$ octant degeneracy. Addressing these questions is of paramount importance at the current and future neutrino experiments including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) which has a baseline of 1300 km. In the standard mode, DUNE is expected to run with a {textit{low energy}} (LE) tuned beam which peaks around the first oscillation maximum ($2-3$ GeV) (and then sharply falls off as we go to higher energies). However, the wide band nature of the beam available at long baseline neutrino facility (LBNF) allows for the flexibility in utilizing beam tunes that are well-suited at higher energies as well. In this work, we utilize a beam that provides high statistics at higher energies which is referred to as the {textit{medium energy}} (ME) beam. This opens up the possibility of exploring not only the usual oscillation channels but also the $ u_{mu} to u_{tau}$ oscillation channel which was otherwise not accessible. Our goal is to find an optimal combination of beam tune and runtime (with the total runtime held fixed) distributed in neutrino and antineutrino mode that leads to an improvement in the sensitivities of these parameters at DUNE. In our analysis, we incorporate all the three channels ($ u_{mu} to u_{e}, u_{mu} to u_{mu}, u_{mu} to u_{tau}$) and develop an understanding of their relative contributions in sensitivities at the level of $Delta chi^2$. Finally, we obtain the preferred combination of runtime using both the beam tunes as well as neutrino and antineutrino mode that lead to enhanced sensitivity to the current unknowns in neutrino oscillation physics i.e., CPV, MH and $theta_{23}$ octant.
Neutrino physics is nowadays receiving more and more attention as a possible source of information for the long-standing problem of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The recent measurement of the mixing angle $theta_{13}$ in the standard mixing oscillation scenario encourages us to pursue the still missing results on leptonic CP violation and absolute neutrino masses. However, puzzling measurements exist that deserve an exhaustive evaluation. The NESSiE Collaboration has been setup to undertake conclusive experiments to clarify the muon-neutrino disappearance measurements at small $L/E$, which will be able to put severe constraints to models with more than the three-standard neutrinos, or even to robustly measure the presence of a new kind of neutrino oscillation for the first time. To this aim the use of the current FNAL-Booster neutrino beam for a Short-Baseline experiment has been carefully evaluated. Its recent proposal refers to the use of magnetic spectrometers at two different sites, Near and Far ones. Their positions have been extensively studied, together with the possible performances of two OPERA-like spectrometers. The proposal is constrained by availability of existing hardware and a time-schedule compatible with the undergoing project of a multi-site Liquid-Argon detectors at FNAL. The experiment to be possibly setup at Booster will allow to definitively clarify the current $ u_{mu}$ disappearance tension with $ u_{e}$ appearance and disappearance at the eV mass scale.
We present results from global fits to the available reactor antineutrino dataset, as of Fall 2019, to determine the global preference for a fourth, sterile neutrino. We have separately considered experiments that measure the integrated inverse-beta decay (IBD) rate from those that measure the energy spectrum of IBD events at one or more locations. The software used is the newly developed GLoBESfit tool set which is based on the publicly available GLoBES framework and will be released as open-source software.
We report results of a search for oscillations involving a light sterile neutrino over distances of 1.04 and $735,mathrm{km}$ in a $ u_{mu}$-dominated beam with a peak energy of $3,mathrm{GeV}$. The data, from an exposure of $10.56times 10^{20},textrm{protons on target}$, are analyzed using a phenomenological model with one sterile neutrino. We constrain the mixing parameters $theta_{24}$ and $Delta m^{2}_{41}$ and set limits on parameters of the four-dimensional Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata matrix, $|U_{mu 4}|^{2}$ and $|U_{tau 4}|^{2}$, under the assumption that mixing between $ u_{e}$ and $ u_{s}$ is negligible ($|U_{e4}|^{2}=0$). No evidence for $ u_{mu} to u_{s}$ transitions is found and we set a world-leading limit on $theta_{24}$ for values of $Delta m^{2}_{41} lesssim 1,mathrm{eV}^{2}$.