Searches for Sterile Neutrinos with the IceCube Detector

Abstract

The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous $\nu_\mu$ or $\bar{\nu}_\mu$ disappearance is observed in either of two independently developed analyses, each using one year of atmospheric neutrino data. New exclusion limits are placed on the parameter space of the 3+1 model, in which muon antineutrinos would experience a strong MSW-resonant oscillation. The exclusion limits extend to $\mathrm{sin}^2 2\theta_{24} \leq$ 0.02 at $\Delta m^2 \sim$ 0.3 $\mathrm{eV}^2$ at the 90\% confidence level. The allowed region from global analysis of appearance experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE, is excluded at approximately the 99\% confidence level for the global best fit value of $|$U$_{e4}|^2$.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

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].…”

Non-standard interactions with high-energy atmospheric neutrinos at IceCube

“…Here we perform an analysis of the NSI effects on the propagation of high-energy atmospheric neutrinos by considering the publicly available IceCube one-year upgoing muon sample [53], referred to as IC86 (IceCube 86-string configuration), which contains 20145 muons detected over a live time of 343.7 days. We focus on the high-energy region of the atmospheric neutrino spectrum, and thus our results are complementary to those of previous analyses of IceCube data [41,48,49], some of them dealing exclusively with the low-energy atmospheric neutrino sample observed at the DeepCore detector [48,49].…”

“…The IceCube data we consider in this paper is the same sample used to search for light sterile neutrino signatures [53]. It contains 20145 events detected during 343.7 days of live data in the period 2011-2012 using the full IceCube 86-string configuration.…”

Getting the most neutrinos out of IsoDAR

“…In particular, Ref. [34] has shown that recent limits on short baseline ν μ disappearance by MINOS [37] and IceCube [38], when incorporated into a global fit, exclude sterile neutrino mass squared splittings below 1 eV 2 at the 2σ level.…”