Sterile-active resonance: A global qualitative picture

TL;DR

This paper develops an effective theory to analyze the sterile-active resonance in neutrino oscillations, revealing the flavor hierarchy and dominant pathways, with implications for disentangling resonance mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic perturbative framework for the sterile-active resonance, focusing on flavor structure and hierarchy in the extended neutrino model.

Findings

Cascade events mainly originate from specific flavor transition pathways.

A three-component fit can disentangle the resonance generation mechanisms.

The effective theory simplifies the complex oscillation dynamics in high matter potential environments.

Abstract

In the $\nu$SM extended by adding an eV-scale sterile state, the $(3+1)$ model, the sterile-active level crossing entails the MSW resonance, here referred as the sterile-active (SA) resonance. In this paper, we construct an effective theory of SA resonance which involves only the sterile-active mixing angles and $\Delta m^2_{41}$, thanks to the given environment of high matter potential which freezes the $\nu$SM oscillations. We give our first attempt at an analytic treatment of the effective theory to illuminate the global picture of the SA resonance at a glance. We formulate a perturbative framework in which the structure of ``texture zeros'' of the $S$ matrix in the flavor space and the suppression by the small parameters $\sin \theta_{j 4}$ ($j=1,2,3$) allows us to reveal the flavor$-$event-type hierarchy of the resonance-effect strength in the probabilities. We have shown that the cascade events dominantly comes from the three paths through $P(\nu_{e} \rightarrow \nu_{e})$, $P(\bar{\nu}_{e} \rightarrow \bar{\nu}_{e})$, and $P(\bar{\nu}_{\mu} \rightarrow \bar{\nu}_{\tau})$, and a three-component fit is suggested to disentangle the SA resonance generation mechanisms.