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arXiv · 1911.01447

On The Decaying-Sterile Neutrino Solution to the Electron (Anti)Neutrino Appearance Anomalies

Abstract

We explore the hypothesis that the unexplained data from LSND and MiniBooNE are evidence for a new, heavy neutrino mass-eigenstate that mixes with the muon-type neutrino and decays into an electron-type neutrino and a new, very light scalar particle. We consider two different decay scenarios, one with Majorana neutrinos, one with Dirac neutrinos; both fit the data equally well. We find a reasonable, albeit not excellent, fit to the data of MiniBooNE and LSND. The decaying-sterile-neutrino hypothesis, however, cleanly evades constraints from disappearance searches and precision measurements of leptonic meson decays, as long as $1~{\rm MeV}\gtrsim m_4\gtrsim 10$~keV. The SBN program at Fermilab should be able to definitively test the decaying-sterile-neutrino hypothesis.

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André de Gouvêa, O. L. G. Peres, Suprabh Prakash, G. V. Stenico. 2019-11-04. On The Decaying-Sterile Neutrino Solution to the Electron (Anti)Neutrino Appearance Anomalies. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep07(2020)141

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