Type-I Seesaw with eV-Scale Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores type-I seesaw models with eV-scale sterile neutrinos, providing exact parametrisations, analyzing their impact on neutrino oscillations, and discussing implications for neutrino mass bounds and CP violation.

Contribution

It introduces exact parametrisations for seesaw models with light sterile neutrinos and analyzes their phenomenological implications, including bounds on neutrino masses and CP violation.

Findings

Light sterile neutrinos impose an upper bound on the lightest neutrino mass.

The models can explain short-baseline neutrino anomalies.

Impact on CP violation and future detection prospects are analyzed.

Abstract

We consider seesaw type-I models including at least one (mostly-)sterile neutrino with mass at the eV scale. Three distinct situations are found, where the presence of light extra neutrinos is naturally justified by an approximately conserved lepton number symmetry. To analyse these scenarios consistently, it is crucial to employ an exact parametrisation of the full mixing matrix. We provide additional exact results, including generalised versions of the seesaw relation and of the Casas-Ibarra parametrisation, valid for every scale of seesaw. We find that the existence of a light sterile neutrino imposes an upper bound on the lightest neutrino mass. We further assess the impact of light sterile states on short- and long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, emphasise future detection prospects, and address CP Violation in this framework via the analysis of CP asymmetries and construction of weak basis invariants. The proposed models can accommodate enough active-sterile mixing to play a role in the explanation of short-baseline anomalies.