Limits on sterile neutrino mixing using atmospheric neutrinos in Super-Kamiokande

K. Abe, Y. Haga, Y. Hayato, M. Ikeda, K. Iyogi, J. Kameda, Y. Kishimoto, M. Miura, S. Moriyama, M. Nakahata, Y. Nakano, S. Nakayama, H. Sekiya, M. Shiozawa, Y. Suzuki, A. Takeda, H. Tanaka, T. Tomura, K. Ueno, R. A. WendellT. Yokozawa, T. Irvine, T. Kajita, I. Kametani, K. Kaneyuki, K. P. Lee, T. McLachlan, Y. Nishimura, E. Richard, K. Okumura, L. Labarga, P. Fernandez, J. Gustafson, E. Kearns, J. L. Raaf, J. L. Stone, L. R. Sulak, S. Berkman, H. A. Tanaka, S. Tobayama, M. Goldhaber, G. Carminati, W. R. Kropp, S. Mine, P. Weatherly, A. Renshaw, M. B. Smy, H. W. Sobel, V. Takhistov, K. S. Ganezer, B. L. Hartfiel, J. Hill, W. E. Keig, N. Hong, J. Y. Kim, I. T. Lim, T. Akiri, A. Himmel, K. Scholberg, C. W. Walter, T. Wongjirad, T. Ishizuka, S. Tasaka, J. S. Jang, J. G. Learned, S. Matsuno, S. N. Smith, T. Hasegawa, T. Ishida, T. Ishii, T. Kobayashi, T. Nakadaira, K. Nakamura, Y. Oyama, K. Sakashita, T. Sekiguchi, T. Tsukamoto, A. T. Suzuki, Y. Takeuchi, C. Bronner, S. Hirota, K. Huang, K. Ieki, T. Kikawa, A. Minamino, A. Murakami, T. Nakaya, K. Suzuki, S. Takahashi, K. Tateishi, Y. Fukuda, K. Choi, Y. Itow, G. Mitsuka, P. Mijakowski, J. Hignight, J. Imber, C. K. Jung, C. Yanagisawa, H. Ishino, A. Kibayashi, Y. Koshio, T. Mori, M. Sakuda, R. Yamaguchi, T. Yano, Y. Kuno, R. Tacik, S. B. Kim, H. Okazawa, Y. Choi, K. Nishijima, M. Koshiba, Y. Suda, Y. Totsuka, M. Yokoyama, K. Martens, Ll Marti, M. R. Vagins, J. F. Martin, P. De Perio, A. Konaka, M. J. Wilking, S. Chen, Y. Zhang, K. Connolly, R. J. Wilkes

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Abstract

We present limits on sterile neutrino mixing using 4,438 live-days of atmospheric neutrino data from the Super-Kamiokande experiment. We search for fast oscillations driven by an eV2-scale mass splitting and for oscillations into sterile neutrinos instead of tau neutrinos at the atmospheric mass splitting. When performing both of these searches we assume that the sterile mass splitting is large, allowing sin2(Δm2L/4E) to be approximated as 0.5, and we assume that there is no mixing between electron neutrinos and sterile neutrinos (|Ue4|2=0). No evidence of sterile oscillations is seen and we limit |Uμ4|2 to less than 0.041 and |Uτ4|2 to less than 0.18 for Δm2>0.1eV2 at the 90% C.L. in a 3+1 framework. The approximations that can be made with atmospheric neutrinos allow these limits to be easily applied to 3+N models, and we provide our results in a generic format to allow comparisons with other sterile neutrino models.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number052019
JournalPhysical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume91
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 24 2015
Externally publishedYes

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Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 American Physical Society.

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