Analysis of published data of electron capture in 7Be in the search for a heavy neutrino in the mass range under 800 keV

TL;DR

This paper reanalyzes existing electron capture data in $^7$Be to set new, more stringent upper limits on the mixing of electron neutrinos with hypothetical heavy neutrinos in the 150-800 keV mass range, improving previous constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel reanalysis method of published spectra to derive tighter upper limits on heavy neutrino mixing in a specific mass range.

Findings

New upper limits on $U^2$ are at least ten times lower than previous bounds in 300-800 keV range.

The analysis technique involves digitizing spectra and searching for Gaussian-like peaks.

Results constrain the possible existence of heavy neutrinos in the specified mass range.

Abstract

We present a reanalysis of the experimental data of electron capture in $^7$Be embedded in Ta which have been published by other authors. Our goal is to set upper limits on a mixture of electron neutrino with a possible right-handed heavy neutrino in the 150--800 keV mass range. In the published experiment a $^7$Li recoil energy spectrum in the 20--200 eV range was measured. In case of electron capture with emission of a heavy neutrino, the recoil spectrum should be shifted to the lower energies. We search for an additional Gauss-shaped structure with the same energy width as the main K-shell transition peak. For this we digitize the published spectrum curve, find the energy resolution, calculate the moving sum of the events along the spectrum in the energy interval of about 3 sigma of energy resolution. Then we use the statistical error of this sum to exclude at some level the appearance of an additional peak. Finally, we present the upper limits at a 95\% confidence level on electron neutrino -- heavy neutrino mixing element, $U^2$, in the mass matrix. New upper limits are at least one order of magnitude lower than the existing data in 300--800 keV mass range.