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MeV-scale sterile neutrino decays at the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino program

Ballett, Peter; Pascoli, Silvia; Ross-Lonergan, Mark

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Authors

Peter Ballett

Mark Ross-Lonergan



Abstract

Nearly-sterile neutrinos with masses in the MeV range and below would be produced in the beam of the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program at Fermilab. In this article, we study the potential for SBN to discover these particles through their subsequent decays in its detectors. We discuss the decays which will be visible at SBN in a minimal and non-minimal extension of the Standard Model, and perform simulations to compute the parameter space constraints which could be placed in the absence of a signal. We demonstrate that the SBN programme can extend existing bounds on well constrained channels such as N → νl+l− and N → l±π∓ while, thanks to the strong particle identification capabilities of liquid-Argon technology, also place bounds on often neglected channels such as N → νγ and N → νπ0. Furthermore, we consider the phenomenological impact of improved event timing information at the three detectors. As well as considering its role in background reduction, we note that if the light-detection systems in SBND and ICARUS can achieve nanosecond timing resolution, the effect of finite sterile neutrino mass could be directly observable, providing a smoking-gun signature for this class of models. We stress throughout that the search for heavy nearly-sterile neutrinos is a complementary new physics analysis to the search for eV-scale oscillations, and would extend the BSM programme of SBN while requiring no beam or detector modifications.

Citation

Ballett, P., Pascoli, S., & Ross-Lonergan, M. (2017). MeV-scale sterile neutrino decays at the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino program. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2017(04), Article 102. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep04%282017%29102

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 26, 2017
Online Publication Date Apr 19, 2017
Publication Date Apr 19, 2017
Deposit Date Nov 8, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of High Energy Physics
Print ISSN 1126-6708
Publisher Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 2017
Issue 04
Article Number 102
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep04%282017%29102
Related Public URLs https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08512

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.





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