# Investigating Sterile Neutrino Flux in the Solar Neutrino Data

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes solar neutrino data from multiple experiments to set new, more stringent bounds on the presence of sterile neutrinos, which are potential dark matter candidates and influence astrophysical models.

## Contribution

It provides a model-independent analysis of updated solar neutrino data, improving constraints on sterile neutrino flux compared to previous studies.

## Key findings

- More stringent limits on sterile neutrino flux in solar data.
- Inclusion of medium energy neutrino data enhances analysis.
- Supports sterile neutrino's role in astrophysics and dark matter.

## Abstract

There are compelling evidences for the existence of a fourth degree of freedom of neutrinos i.e. sterile neutrino. In the recent studies the role of sterile component of neutrinos has been found to be crucial, not only in particle physics, but also in astrophysics and cosmology. This has been proposed to be one of the potential candidates of dark matter. In this work we investigate the updated solar neutrino data available from all the relevant experiments including Borexino and KamLAND solar phase in a model independent way, and obtain bounds on the sterile neutrino component present in the solar neutrino flux. The mystery of the missing neutrinos is further deepening as subsequent experiments are coming up with their results. The energy spectrum of solar neutrinos, as predicted by Standard Solar Models (SSM), is seen by neutrino experiments at different parts as they are sensitive to various neutrino energy ranges. It is interesting to note that more than $98\%$ of the calculated standard model solar neutrino flux lies below $1MeV$. Therefore, the study of low energy neutrinos can give us better understanding and the possibility to know about the presence of antineutrino and sterile neutrino components in solar neutrino flux. As such, this work becomes interesting as we include the data from medium energy ($\sim 1MeV$) experiments i.e. Borexino and KamLAND solar phase. In our study we retrieve the bounds existing in literature, and rather provide more stringent limits on sterile neutrino($\nu_{s}$) flux available in solar neutrino data.