Neutrino interactions in liquid scintillators including active-sterile neutrino mixing

TL;DR

This paper investigates how neutrino oscillations, including potential sterile neutrinos, affect supernova neutrino fluxes and detection in liquid scintillators, providing insights into neutrino properties and supernova mechanisms.

Contribution

It models the impact of active-sterile neutrino mixing on supernova neutrino fluxes and offers a statistical method to estimate mixing parameters from detection data.

Findings

Neutrino flux distributions are significantly altered by sterile neutrino mixing.

Detection rates in liquid scintillators depend on active-sterile mixing parameters.

Statistical analysis can constrain sterile neutrino mixing angles.

Abstract

Neutrinos play an important role in core-collapse supernova events since they are a key piece to understand the explosion mechanisms. The analysis of the neutrino fluxes can bring answers to neutrino's related problems e.g.: mass hierarchy, spectral splitting, sterile neutrinos, etc. In this work we study the impact of neutrino oscillations and the possible existence of eV sterile neutrinos upon the supernova neutrino flux $F_\nu(E)$. We have calculated the energy distribution of the neutrino flux from a supernova and the total number of events which would be detected in a liquid scintillator. We also present an analysis for the conversion probabilities as a function of the active-sterile neutrino mixing parameters. Finally, we have carried out a statistical analysis to extract values for the mixing parameters of the model.