Measuring active-to-sterile neutrino oscillations with neutral current coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering
Light sterile neutrinos have been introduced as an explanation for a number of oscillation signals at Δm[superscript 2]∼1 eV[superscript 2]. Neutrino oscillations at relatively short baselines provide a probe of these possible new states. This paper describes an accelerator-based experiment using n...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
American Physical Society
2012
|
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72128 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6393-0438 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4435-4623 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9285-5556 |
| Summary: | Light sterile neutrinos have been introduced as an explanation for a number of oscillation signals at Δm[superscript 2]∼1 eV[superscript 2]. Neutrino oscillations at relatively short baselines provide a probe of these possible new states. This paper describes an accelerator-based experiment using neutral current coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering to strictly search for active-to-sterile neutrino oscillations. This experiment could, thus, definitively establish the existence of sterile neutrinos and provide constraints on their mixing parameters. A cyclotron-based proton beam can be directed to multiple targets, producing a low-energy pion and muon decay-at-rest neutrino source with variable distance to a single detector. Two types of detectors are considered: a germanium-based detector inspired by the SuperCDMS design and a liquid argon detector inspired by the proposed CLEAR experiment. |
|---|