The Effect of a Light Sterile Neutrino at NO$\nu$A and DUNE

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Now that the NOvA experiment is approaching two years run time and has released some preliminary data, some constraints for the oscillation parameters can be inferred. Currently the best fits for NOvA are three separate results, the reason they are indistinct is that they produce almost degenerate probability curves. It has been postulated that these degeneracies can be resolved by running antineutrinos at NOvA and/or combining its data with T2K. However, this degeneracy resolution power can be compromised if sterile neutrinos are present due to additional degrees of freedom that can significantly alter the oscillation probability for any of the current best fits. We aim to investigate this degradation in predictive power and the effect of the DUNE experiment on it.

Related collections

Most cited references 2

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Imprints of CP violation induced by sterile neutrinos in T2K data

, (2015)

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 $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ 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.