Statistical tests of sterile neutrinos using cosmology and short-baseline data

Abstract

In this paper we revisit the question of the information which cosmology provides on the scenarios with sterile neutrinos invoked to describe the SBL anomalies using Bayesian statistical tests. We perform an analysis of the cosmological data in $Λ$CDM$+r+ν_s$ cosmologies for different cosmological data combinations, and obtain the marginalized cosmological likelihood in terms of the two relevant parameters, the sterile neutrino mass $m_s$ and its contribution to the energy density of the early Universe $N_{\rm eff}$. We then present an analysis to quantify at which level a model with one sterile neutrino is (dis)favoured with respect to a model with only three active neutrinos, using results from both short-baseline experiments and cosmology. We study the dependence of the results on the cosmological data considered, in particular on the inclusion of the recent BICEP2 results and the SZ cluster data from the Planck mission. We find that only when the cluster data is included the model with one extra sterile neutrino can become more favoured that the model with only the three active ones provided the sterile neutrino contribution to radiation density is suppressed with respect to the fully thermalized scenario. We have also quantified the level of (in)compatibility between the sterile neutrino masses implied by the cosmological and SBL results.