Searching for Very Light Sterile Neutrino with Matter Effect Correction

Abstract

The standard 3-flavor neutrino oscillation has been well established. However, some experimental hints suggest the existence of new types of neutrinos at mass of eV scale. Those sterile neutrinos will change the neutrino oscillation pattern for short-baseline neutrino experiments with the 3(active)+N(sterile) neutrino mixing framework. Recent proposed medium baseline reactor neutrino experiments are sensitive to those very light sterile neutrinos at 10−4 to 0.01 eV2 mass-squared difference through electron antineutrino disappearance channel. In this paper, we will discuss the matter effect correction on those very light sterile neutrino oscillation. As shown in our study, the matter effect correction for sterile neutrino oscillation is quite small (< 4%), and at the same scale as the 3-flavor active neutrino oscillation case.