1307.6824 (Arman Esmaili et al.)

Restricting the LSND and MiniBooNE sterile neutrinos with the IceCube atmospheric neutrino data    [PDF]

Arman Esmaili, Alexei Yu. Smirnov

We study oscillations of the high energy atmospheric neutrinos in the Earth into sterile neutrinos with the eV-scale mass. The MSW resonance and parametric enhancement of the $\bar{\nu}_\mu\to\bar{\nu}_s$ oscillations lead to distortion of the zenith angle distribution of the muon-track events which can be observed by IceCube. Due to matter effect, the IceCube signal depends not only on the mixing element $U_{\mu 4}$ relevant for LSND and MiniBooNE but also on $U_{\tau 4}$ and the CP-violating phase $\delta_{24}$. We show that the case with $U_{\tau 4} = \delta_{24} = 0$ leads to the weakest IceCube signal and therefore should be used to bound $U_{\mu 4}$. We compute the zenith angle distributions of the $\nu_\mu-$events for different energy intervals in the range (0.1 - 10) TeV and find that inclusion of the energy information (binning in energy) improves the sensitivity to $\nu_s$ drastically. We estimate that with already collected (during 3 - 4 years) IceCube-86 statistics the mixing required by LSND and MiniBooNE can be excluded at $(4 - 6) \sigma$ level.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6824