Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Oscillations using DUNE Near Detector

TL;DR

The paper evaluates DUNE's near detector's potential to detect sterile neutrino oscillations, demonstrating it can test the LSND parameter space with high precision, considering various experimental factors.

Contribution

It presents a detailed sensitivity analysis of DUNE's near detector for sterile neutrino oscillations, highlighting its capability to probe the LSND parameter region effectively.

Findings

DUNE near detector can test the entire LSND parameter space.

Detector mass and baseline significantly influence sensitivity.

Systematic uncertainties have minimal impact on results.

Abstract

DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) is a proposed long-baseline neutrino experiment in the US with a baseline of 1300 km from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) to Sanford Underground Research Facility, which will house a 40 kt Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) as the far detector. The experiment will also have a fine grained near detector for accurately measuring the initial fluxes. We show that the energy range of the fluxes and baseline of the DUNE near detector is conducive for observing $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ oscillations of $\Delta m^2 \sim$ eV$^2$ scale sterile neutrinos, and hence can be effectively used for testing to very high accuracy the reported oscillation signal seen by the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments. We study the sensitivity of the DUNE near detector to sterile neutrino oscillations by varying the baseline, detector fiducial mass and systematic uncertainties. We find that the detector mass and baseline of the currently proposed near detector at DUNE will be able to test the entire LSND parameter region with good precision. The dependence of sensitivity on baseline and detector mass is seen to give interesting results, while dependence on systematic uncertainties is seen to be small.