Abstract
We address the phenomenology of light sterile neutrinos, with an emphasis on short-baseline neutrino oscillations. After reviewing the observed short-baseline neutrino oscillation anomalies, we discuss the global fit of the data and the current appearance–disappearance tension. We also review briefly the effects of light sterile neutrinos in β decay, neutrinoless double-β decay, and cosmology. Finally, we discuss future perspectives of the search for the effects of eV-scale sterile neutrinos.
Highlights
Because sterile neutrinos are nonstandard particles that could enable exploration of New Physics beyond the Standard Model
This review considers only the first indication, which started in the mid-1990s with the results of the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment [3, 4] at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF) in favor of SBL νμ → νe oscillations that require the existence of sterile neutrinos at the eV scale
After a progressive decrease in interest of the high-energy community in the sterile neutrinos indicated by the LSND signal, attention was renewed in 2011 with the discovery of the so-called reactor antineutrino anomaly due to a deficit of the rate of reactor antineutrino detection in several experiments at distances between approximately 10 and 100 m with respect to that predicted by new theoretical calculations of the reactor antineutrino fluxes [7,8,9]
Summary
The Standard Model of electroweak interactions is a quantum field theory based on the invariance under the group SU[2]L × U(1)Y of local gauge symmetry transformations. 3+1 In these schemes, there is a new nonstandard massive neutrino, ν4, that is heavier than the three standard massive neutrinos, with a mass gap corresponding to m2SBL These schemes are allowed by the existing solar, atmospheric, and long-baseline experiments because they can be a perturbation of standard 3ν mixing that has small effects on the oscillations of solar, atmospheric, and long-baseline neutrinos, such that they are compatible with the existing data. Where m241 = m2SBL, and sin2 2θαβ = 4|Uα4|2 δαβ − |Uβ4|2 These oscillation probabilities have the same form as the oscillation probabilities in the case of two-neutrino mixing [14], and their amplitudes have been written in terms of the effective mixing angles θαβ that depend only on the elements in the fourth column of the mixing matrix (Equation 6), which connect the flavor neutrinos to the nonstandard massive neutrino ν4.
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