Sterile Neutrino Searches with MINOS/MINOS+

Leigh Howard Whitehead
2017 Proceedings of 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics — PoS(ICHEP2016)   unpublished
The MINOS and MINOS+ experiment ran from 2005 until 2016 with two detectors at baselines of 1 km and 735 km exposed by the NuMI beam from Fermilab. The NuMI beam neutrino flux peaked at an energy of 3 GeV during the MINOS era in both ν µ and ν µ modes. The MINOS+ data were taken entirely in ν µ mode with a peak energy of 7 GeV. A study of three-flavour oscillations with the full MINOS sample and the first two years of data from MINOS+ measured ∆m 2 32 = (2.42 ± 0.09) × 10 −3 eV 2 assuming the
more » ... rmal Hierarchy, and ∆m 2 32 = − 2.48 +0.09 −0.11 × 10 −3 eV 2 in the Inverted Hierarchy. Searches for both sterile neutrinos and sterile antineutrinos were performed with no significant evidence of a signal, hence exclusion limits were placed over six orders of magnitude of the sterile neutrino mass-splitting ∆m 2 41 . A joint analysis of the MINOS ν µ disappearance sample and the Daya Bay and Bugey-3 ν e disappearance samples excludes the LSND and MiniBooNE allowed regions for ∆m 2 41 < 0.8 eV 2 at 95% C.L.. Finally, an analysis searching for anomalous ν e appearance above 6 GeV in MINOS+ was used to set a limit on the allowed sterile neutrino parameter space.
doi:10.22323/1.282.0480 fatcat:ixm6inrqajdpppf4ld4y6w7h5i