Matter Effects in Upward-Going Muons and Sterile Neutrino Oscillations
The MACRO Collaboration
TL;DR
This study analyzes upward-going muons to investigate neutrino oscillations, finding strong evidence against muon-sterile neutrino oscillations and supporting muon-tau oscillations with specific parameters.
Contribution
It provides experimental evidence favoring tau neutrino oscillations over sterile neutrino oscillations using matter effect analysis in atmospheric neutrinos.
Findings
Muon-tau oscillations consistent with data
Sterile neutrino oscillations disfavored at 99% confidence level
Supports two-flavor neutrino oscillation model with specific parameters
Abstract
The angular distribution of upward-going muons produced by atmospheric neutrinos in the rock below the MACRO detector show anomalies in good agreement with two flavor neutrino-mu ==> neutrino-tau oscillations with maximum mixing and Delta m**2 around 0.0024 eV**2. Exploiting the dependence of magnitude of the matter effect on oscillation channel, and using a set of 809 upward-going muons observed in MACRO, we show that the two flavor neutrino-mu ==> neutrino-sterile oscillation is disfavored with 99% C.L. with respect to neutrino-mu ==> neutrino-tau.
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