Testing New Physics Explanations of the MiniBooNE Anomaly at Neutrino Scattering Experiments.

Carlos A Argüelles,Yu-Dai Tsai,Matheus Hostert

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.123.261801

Carlos A Argüelles, Yu-Dai Tsai + Show 1 more

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Heavy neutrinos with additional interactions have recently been proposed as an explanation to the MiniBooNE excess. These scenarios often rely on marginally boosted particles to explain the excess angular spectrum, thus predicting large rates at higher-energy neutrino-electron scattering experiments. We place new constraints on this class of models based on neutrino-electron scattering sideband measurements performed at MINERνA and CHARM-II. A simultaneous explanation of the angular and energy distributions of the MiniBooNE excess in terms of heavy neutrinos with light mediators is severely constrained by our analysis. In general, high-energy neutrino-electron scattering experiments provide strong constraints on explanations of the MiniBooNE observation involving light mediators.

Highlights

Introduction.—Nonzero neutrino masses have been established in the last twenty years by measurements of neutrino flavor conversion in natural and human-made sources, including long- and short-baseline experiments
These new physics (NP) scenarios typically require the existence of new particles, which can participate in short-baseline oscillations [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37], change the neutrino propagation in matter [38,39,40,41], or be produced in the beam or in the detector and its surroundings [42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49]
Many MiniBooNE explanations lack a connection to other open problems in particle physics, recent models [50,51,52,53,54] are motivated by neutrino-mass generation via hidden interactions in the heavy-neutrino sector

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Introduction

Introduction.—Nonzero neutrino masses have been established in the last twenty years by measurements of neutrino flavor conversion in natural and human-made sources, including long- and short-baseline experiments. Neutrino-mass-related models that have been proposed as an explanation of the anomalous observation of νe-like events in MiniBooNE [5]. Using data collected between 2002 and 2017, the experiment has observed an excess of νe-like events that is currently in tension with the standard three-neutrino prediction and is beyond statistical doubt at the 4.7σ level [5].

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