Sterile Neutrino Search with MINOS

Abstract

MINOS, Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in the NuMI muon neutrino beam at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL. It consists of two detectors, a near detector positioned 1\,km from the source of the beam and a far detector 734\,km away in Minnesota. MINOS is primarily designed to observe muon neutrino disappearance resulting from three flavor oscillations. The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts that neutrinos oscillate between three active flavors as they propagate through space. This means that a muon type neutrino has a certain probability to later interact as a different type of neutrino. In the standard picture, the neutrino oscillation probabilities depend only on three neutrino flavors and two mass splittings, $\Delta \text{m}^{2}$. An anomaly was observed by the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments that suggests the existence of a fourth, sterile neutrino flavor that does not interact through any of the known Standard Model interactions. Oscillations into a theoretical sterile flavor may be observed by a deficit in neutral current interactions in the MINOS detectors. A distortion in the charged current energy spectrum might also be visible if oscillations into the sterile flavor are driven by a large mass-squared difference, $\Delta \text{m}^{2}_{s}\sim$ 1\,eV$^{2}$. The results of the 2013 sterile neutrino search are presented here.