DUNE sensitivities to the mixing between sterile and tau neutrinos

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2018; no. 7; pp. 1 - 23
• Main Authors: Coloma, Pilar, Forero, David V., Parke, Stephen J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.07.2018; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Berlin; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Beyond Standard Model; Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Cosmology; CP violation; Elementary Particles; Experiments; High energy physics; Neutrino Physics; Neutrinos; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Regular Article - Theoretical Physics; Relativity Theory; String Theory; Neutrino Physics; Beyond Standard Model; CP violation
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP07(2018)079

A bstract 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 is currently only weakly constrained by current data from SuperK, IceCube and NOvA, however, these constrains will continue to improve as more data is collected by these experiments. In this work, we study the potential of the DUNE experiment to constrain the mixing angle which parametrizes this mixing, θ 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.