Limits on Active to Sterile Neutrino Oscillations from Disappearance Searches in the MINOS, Daya Bay, and Bugey-3 Experiments

Abstract

Searches for a light sterile neutrino have been performed independently by the MINOS and the Daya Bay experiments using the muon (anti)neutrino and electron antineutrino disappearance channels, respectively. In this Letter, results from both experiments are combined with those from the Bugey-3 reactor neutrino experiment to constrain oscillations into light sterile neutrinos. The three experiments are sensitive to complementary regions of parameter space, enabling the combined analysis to probe regions allowed by the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) and MiniBooNE experiments in a minimally extended four-neutrino flavor framework. Stringent limits on sin 2 2θµe are set over 6 orders of magnitude in the sterile mass-squared splitting ∆m 2 41 . The sterile-neutrino mixing phase space allowed by the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments is excluded for ∆m 2 41 < 0.8 eV 2 at 95% CLs.

A search for sterile neutrinos with the latest cosmological observations

“…This result seems to favor a massless sterile neutrino, in tension with the previous short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments that prefer the mass of sterile neutrino at around 1 eV. But our result is consistent with the recent result of neutrino oscillation experiment done by the Daya Bay and MINOS collaborations [81], as well as the recent result of cosmic ray experiment done by the IceCube collaboration [82].…”

“…Together with the constraint results for the massless sterile neutrino, we can conclude that the current observations do not seem to favor a massive sterile neutrino, but favor a massless sterile neutrino in some sense (only at the more than 1σ statistical significance). Our result is consistent with the recent result of neutrino oscillation experiment by the Daya Bay and MINOS collaborations [81], as well as the recent result of cosmic ray experiment by the IceCube collaboration [82].…”

A Combined View of Sterile-Neutrino Constraints from CMB and Neutrino Oscillation Measurements

“…Reactor experiments observe a deficit of ≈ 6% in the ν e flux compared to expectations [9]. Furthermore [13].…”

Probing a four flavor vis-a-vis three flavor neutrino mixing for ultrahigh energy neutrino signals at a 1 km2 detector

“…New data from reactor and other short-and long-baseline neutrino experiments (such as MINOS [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], Daya Bay [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], Bugey [33], etc.) and their analyses considering the active-sterile neutrino oscillation have given new bounds on active-sterile mixing angles and Δm 2 .…”