Atmospheric neutrinos as a probe of eV^2-scale active-sterile oscillations

Details Atmospheric neutrinos as a probe of eV^2-scale active-sterile oscillations Atmospheric neutrinos as a probe of eV^2-scale active-sterile oscillations

2011-08-22

arxiv.org/abs/1108.4360v1

Physics

High Energy Physics

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

14 pages, 18 figures

Scientific paper

The down-going atmospheric muon neutrino and antineutrino fluxes can be significantly altered due to the presence of eV^2-scale active-sterile oscillations. We study the sensitivity of a large magnetized iron detector like the proposed ICAL at INO to these oscillations. Such oscillations are indicated in the antineutrino sector by recent results from MiniBooNE, and by earlier ones from LSND. In addition, there are other tentative indications of the presence of sterile states in both the neutrino and antineutrino sectors. Using the allowed sterile parameter ranges in a 3+1 mixing framework in order to test the these results, we first perform a fit with active-sterile oscillations in the muon antineutrino sector only, using the ratio of downgoing muon neutrino and antineutrino events, and present the oscillation exclusion limits obtained. We then assume active-sterile oscillations in both the muon neutrino and antineutrino sectors, and compute oscillation exclusion limits and regions of sterile parameter sensitivity using atmospheric down-going muon neutrino and anti-neutrino events independently. We find that (for both muon neutrinos and antineutrinos), even for moderate exposures (250 kT-yr) an ICAL-like detector provides significant sensitivity to regions of parameter space with \Delta m^2 \leq 1 eV^2 and sin^2 2\Theta_\mu\mu \geq 0.4 where currently no bounds exist for muon antineutrinos, in addition to providing complementary coverage for the region \Delta m^2 \geq 1 eV^2. These regions become significantly enhanced for higher exposures of about 1 Mt-yr.

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