TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alonso-Gonzalez, D.
AU  - Amaral, D. W. P.
AU  - Bariego-Quintana, A.
AU  - Cerdeño, D.
AU  - de los Rios, M.
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023//
TI  - Measuring the sterile neutrino mass in spallation source and direct detection experiments
T2  - J. High Energy Phys.
JO  - Journal of High Energy Physics
SP  - 096
EP  - 27pp
VL  - 12
IS  - 12
PB  - Springer
KW  - Neutrino Interactions
KW  - Non-Standard Neutrino Properties
KW  - Sterile or Heavy Neutrinos
AB  - We explore the complementarity of direct detection (DD) and spallation source (SS) experiments for the study of sterile neutrino physics. We focus on the sterile baryonic neutrino model: an extension of the Standard Model that introduces a massive sterile neutrino with couplings to the quark sector via a new gauge boson. In this scenario, the inelastic scattering of an active neutrino with the target material in both DD and SS experiments gives rise to a characteristic nuclear recoil energy spectrum that can allow for the reconstruction of the neutrino mass in the event of a positive detection. We first derive new bounds on this model based on the data from the COHERENT collaboration on CsI and LAr targets, which we find do not yet probe new areas of the parameter space. We then assess how well future SS experiments will be able to measure the sterile neutrino mass and mixings, showing that masses in the range similar to 15 – 50 MeV can be reconstructed. We show that there is a degeneracy in the measurement of the sterile neutrino mixing that substantially affects the reconstruction of parameters for masses of the order of 40 MeV. Thanks to their lower energy threshold and sensitivity to the solar tau neutrino flux, DD experiments allow us to partially lift the degeneracy in the sterile neutrino mixings and considerably improve its mass reconstruction down to 9 MeV. Our results demonstrate the excellent complementarity between DD and SS experiments in measuring the sterile neutrino mass and highlight the power of DD experiments in searching for new physics in the neutrino sector.
SN  - 1029-8479
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05176
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2023)096
DO  - 10.1007/JHEP12(2023)096
LA  - English
N1  - WOS:001129664000003
ID  - Alonso-Gonzalez_etal2023
ER  -