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Abstract
According to different effects on neutrino oscillations, the unitarity violation in the MNSP matrix can be classified into the direct unitarity violation and the indirect unitarity violation which are induced by the existence of the light and the heavy sterile neutrinos respectively. Of which sub-eV sterile neutrinos are of most interesting. We study in this paper the possibility of searching for sub-eV sterile neutrinos in the precision reactor antineutrino oscillation experiments with three different baselines at around 500 m, 2 km and 60 km. We find that the antineutrino survival probabilities obtained in the reactor experiments are sensitive only to the direct unitarity violation and offer very concentrated sensitivity to the two parameters θ14 and Δm412. If such light sterile neutrinos do exist, the active–sterile mixing angle θ14 could be acquired by the combined rate analysis at all the three baselines and the mass-squared difference Δm412 could be obtained by taking the Fourier transformation to the L/E spectrum. Of course, for such measurements to succeed, both high energy resolution and large statistics are essentially important.
Highlights
According to different effects on neutrino oscillations, the unitarity violation in the MNSP matrix can be classified into the direct unitarity violation and the indirect unitarity violation which are induced by the existence of the light and the heavy sterile neutrinos respectively
According to the different effects on neutrino oscillations, the unitarity violation in the MNSP matrix can be classified into two categories: direct unitarity violation and indirect unitarity violation [3]
The indirect unitarity violation is brought by the existence of heavy sterile neutrinos, which themselves are too massive to be kinematically produced in the neutrino oscillation experiments
Summary
Besides the three known active neutrinos νe, νμ and ντ , there may exist additional sterile neutrinos which do not directly take part in the weak interactions except those induced by the mixing with active neutrinos [1]. We can clearly see from Eq (2) that such effect will not take place if there exist only light sterile neutrinos It would be a definite signal of the indirect unitarity violation if the “zero-distance” effect can be observed in future neutrino oscillation experiments. For the (3+1⁄2) or (3+1) scenario where only one light or one heavy sterile neutrino is added, the corresponding survival probabilities can be obtained by taking |Ve5| = 0 or |Ve4| = 0 respectively. One may immediately find from Eq (7) that the mixing angle θ15 is not shown in the electron antineutrino survival probability which implies that the reactor experiment is almost insensitive to the indirect unitarity violation induced by the heavy sterile neutrinos. In this paper we will only discuss the antineutrino survival probability itself and focus on the direct unitarity violation effects in the reactor experiments induced by sub-eV sterile neutrinos. We will show that the reactor experiments can provide definite signals for each of them
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