
TL;DR
This paper investigates atmospheric sterile neutrino production and decay at Super-Kamiokande, establishing new upper bounds on active-sterile mixing angles and proposing diagnostic tools for future detection.
Contribution
It provides the first detailed estimation of sterile neutrino flux from atmospheric sources and sets improved upper bounds on mixing parameters based on Super-Kamiokande data.
Findings
Upper bound on muon-type mixing: |Θ_μ|^2 ≲ 5×10^{-5} for 20-80 MeV masses.
Sterile neutrino decays produce distinctive two-electron Cherenkov rings.
Opening angle and energy of rings can help identify sterile neutrino events.
Abstract
We study production of sterile neutrinos in the atmosphere and their detection at Super-Kamiokande. A sterile neutrino in the mass range is produced by muon or pion decay, and decays to an electron-positron pair and an active neutrino. Such a decay of the sterile neutrino leaves two electron-like Cherenkov rings in the detector. We estimate the sterile neutrino flux from the well-established active neutrino fluxes and study the number of the decay events in the detector. The upper bounds for the active-sterile mixings are obtained by comparing the -like events from the sterile neutrino decays and the observed data by Super-Kamiokande. The upper bound for the muon type mixing is found to be for , which is significantly…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
