2014/05/31 by Ivan Girardi, Davide Meloni, Davide Melon +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Measurements of neutrino speed #Mixing (physics) #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino oscillation #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Solar neutrino #Solar neutrino problem #Sterile neutrino #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep08(2014)057
published as JHEP 08 (2014) 057 · 23 pages, 9 figures, more discussions added, matches the published version
openalex publication_date 2014/08/01 · arxiv created 2014/08/21 · arxiv updated 2014/08/25 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Models of neutrino mixing involving one or more sterile neutrinos have resurrected their importance in the light of recent cosmological data. In this case, reactor antineutrino experiments offer an ideal place to look for signatures of sterile neutrinos due to their impact on neutrino flavor transitions. In this work, we show that the high-precision data of the Daya Bay experiment constrain the 3+1 neutrino scenario imposing upper bounds on the relevant active-sterile mixing angle sin2 2θ 14 ≲ 0.06 at 3σ confidence level for the mass-squared difference Δm 41 2 in the range (10−3, 10−1) eV2. The latter bound can be improved by six years of running of the JUNO experiment, sin2 2θ 14 ≲ 0.016, although in the smaller mass range Δm 41 2 ∈ (10−4, 10−3) eV2. We have also investigated the impact of sterile neutrinos on precision measurements of the standard neutrino oscillation parameters θ 13 and Δm 31 2 (at Daya Bay and JUNO), θ 12 and Δm 21 2 (at JUNO), and most importantly, the neutrino mass hierarchy (at JUNO). We find that, except for the obvious situation where Δm 41 2 ≲ Δm 31 2 , sterile states do not affect these measurements substantially.