New limits on heavy sterile neutrino mixing in ⁸\rmB-decay obtained with the Borexino detector

2013/11/21 by Borexino collaboration, G. Bellini, J. Benziger +87 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-ex

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.88.072010

published as Phys. Rev. D 88, 072010 (2013) · 7 pages, 6 figures

arxiv created 2013/11/21 · arxiv updated 2013/11/22

Abstract

If heavy neutrinos with mass m_ν_H≥2 m_e are produced in the Sun via the decay ⁸\rmB → ⁸\rmBe + e⁺ + ν_H in a side branch of pp-chain, they would undergo the observable decay into an electron, a positron and a light neutrino ν_H→ν_L+e⁺+e^-. In the present work Borexino data are used to set a bound on the existence of such decays. We constrain the mixing of a heavy neutrino with mass 1.5 MeV ≤ m_ν_H ≤ 14 MeV to be |U_eH|²≤ (10^-3-4×10^-6) respectively. These are tighter limits on the mixing parameters than obtained in previous experiments at nuclear reactors and accelerators.

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