Sterile neutrino searches at tagged kaon beams

TL;DR

This paper proposes using tagged kaon beams to produce pure and well-characterized neutrino beams for testing sterile neutrino oscillations, enabling decisive experiments to confirm or refute recent anomalies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup utilizing tagged kaon beams and a liquid argon detector to directly test sterile neutrino oscillations in the multi-eV range.

Findings

Potential to decisively test sterile neutrino oscillations

Utilizes flavor pure neutrino beams with known normalization

Proposes a practical experimental configuration

Abstract

Tagged kaon beams are attractive neutrino sources, which would provide flavor pure $\nu_e$-beams with exactly measured normalization. We point out that this also leads to an anti-tagged flavor pure $\nu_\mu$-beam, with equally well known normalization. Exposing a 1 kt liquid argon detector at a baseline of 1 km to this combination of unique beams allows to decisively test recent indications by IceCube and Neutrino-4 of sterile neutrino oscillations in the multi-eV range.