Constraining Super-light Sterile Neutrino Scenario by JUNO and RENO-50

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how upcoming reactor neutrino experiments JUNO and RENO-50 can detect or constrain super-light sterile neutrinos, which are hypothesized to explain solar neutrino data anomalies, by analyzing their sensitivity to specific neutrino mixing parameters.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that JUNO and RENO-50 have significant potential to discover or limit super-light sterile neutrinos, with JUNO being near optimal for this purpose.

Findings

JUNO can effectively probe super-light sterile neutrino parameters.

RENO-50 also has strong sensitivity to the SSNS.

JUNO's configuration is close to the optimal setup for this investigation.

Abstract

The Super-light Sterile Neutrino Scenario (SSNS) has been proposed in the literature to explain the suppression of the upturn in the low energy solar data. In this scenario, the mass splitting between the new mass eigenstate, $\nu_0$ and the standard $\nu_1$ is of order of $\Delta m_{01}^2\sim 10^{-5}$ eV$^2$. Reactor neutrino experiments with baseline larger than $\sim$20 km can help us to probe this scenario. We study the potential of upcoming JUNO and RENO-50 reactor experiments for discovering the superlight sterile neutrino or constraining its mixing parameters. We study the dependence of sensitivity to the SNSS and find that the proposed JUNO setup is very close to the optimal setup for probing the SSNS.