Measuring active-to-sterile neutrino oscillations with neutral current coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering

Citation Anderson, A. et al. " Measuring Active-to-sterile Neutrino Oscillations with Neutral Current Coherent Neutrino-nucleus Scattering. " Physical Review D 86.1 (2012). Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Light sterile neutrinos have been introduced as an explanation for a number of oscillation signals at Ám 2 $ 1 eV 2. Neutrino oscillations at relatively short baselines provide a probe of these possible new states. This paper describes an accelerator-based experiment using neutral current coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering to strictly search for active-to-sterile neutrino oscillations. This experiment could, thus, definitively establish the existence of sterile neutrinos and provide constraints on their mixing parameters. A cyclotron-based proton beam can be directed to multiple targets, producing a low-energy pion and muon decay-at-rest neutrino source with variable distance to a single detector. Two types of detectors are considered: a germanium-based detector inspired by the SuperCDMS design and a liquid argon detector inspired by the proposed CLEAR experiment.