Searches for Sterile Neutrinos with the IceCube Detector

The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous $ν_μ$ or $\barν_μ$...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: The IceCube Collaboration
Format: Text
Language:unknown
Published: arXiv 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1605.01990
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01990
Description
Summary:The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous $ν_μ$ or $\barν_μ$ disappearance is observed in either of two independently developed analyses, each using one year of atmospheric neutrino data. New exclusion limits are placed on the parameter space of the 3+1 model, in which muon antineutrinos would experience a strong MSW-resonant oscillation. The exclusion limits extend to $\mathrm{sin}^2 2θ_{24} \leq$ 0.02 at $Δm^2 \sim$ 0.3 $\mathrm{eV}^2$ at the 90\% confidence level. The allowed region from global analysis of appearance experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE, is excluded at approximately the 99\% confidence level for the global best fit value of $|$U$_{e4}|^2$. : 10 pages, 5 figures