Light Sterile Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current status of light sterile neutrino searches, discussing experimental constraints from oscillation, decay, and cosmological observations, and highlighting the challenges in confirming their existence.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of experimental and observational constraints on light sterile neutrinos, integrating diverse data sources and analysis methods.

Findings

Sterile neutrino properties are constrained by multiple experimental approaches.

Cosmological data impose significant limits on sterile neutrino parameters.

Current evidence for sterile neutrinos remains inconclusive.

Abstract

We review the status of light sterile neutrino searches, motivated by the original Short BaseLine (SBL) anomalies. Here, we discuss how sterile neutrino properties can be constrained by different types of neutrino oscillation experiments (considering appearance or disappearance probes in different oscillation channels) and non-oscillation measurements. These latter include experiments aiming at obtaining a value for the absolute scale of neutrino masses ($\beta$ decay probes) and the indirect constraints that we could obtain from cosmological observations.