Confronting the Stochastic Neutrino Mixing Mechanism and the sterile neutrino hypothesis as a solution to the short baseline neutrino anomalies

TL;DR

This paper compares sterile neutrino and stochastic mixing models as solutions to short baseline neutrino anomalies, proposing an experiment to distinguish between them with current detector technology.

Contribution

It analyzes current data to compare two models and proposes a new experimental setup to differentiate between the stochastic neutrino mixing mechanism and sterile neutrino hypotheses.

Findings

SNMM fits data worse than sterile neutrino model but cannot be discarded.

Proposed experiment can distinguish models within 2σ for certain parameters.

Sensitivity analysis shows feasibility of differentiating models with 5 kton-years of data.

Abstract

We compare the solutions to the short baseline neutrino anomaly based on oscillations to sterile neutrinos and the Stochastic Neutrino Mixing Mechanism (SNMM) through an analysis of the present neutrino data. The SNMM suggests worse fits than a 3 + 1 sterile neutrino model, although it cannot be discarded by present data. We propose an experiment to distinguish between both solutions, based on placing a $^8$Li source inside a 5kton-yr detector (like SNO). We studied the sensitivity of such an experiment, which makes it possible to discriminate within $2\sigma$ the SNMM from the 3+1 sterile hypothesis for some particular values of the relevant parameters in 5 kton-years of running.