Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “NEUTRINO”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 91 records · Page 5
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1993

A Type 2 supernovae constraint on neutrino(sub e) - neutrino(sub s) mixing

The role of a resonant nu(e) - nu(s) oscillation is discussed in the event of a supernova explosion. It is concluded that a significant nu(e) - nu(s) mixing may hinder the ability of the supernova to explode. It may also cool the proto-neutron star too quickly with respect to the observed cooling time of several seconds. The constraints on the nu(e) - nu(s) mixing parameters based on the above arguments are calculated.

Shi, X.↗
NASA NTRS2022

NIAC Phase-2 Final Report for Astrophysics and Technical Lab Studies of a Solar Neutrino Spacecraft Detector

The Sun provides all the energy that our planet needs for life and has been doing so for five billion years. Understanding our Sun and its interior is one of the major goals of the NASA Science program. Still this is a very difficult task because very little makes it directly out of the Sun’s interior. The energy we see today, that warms the Earth, was made 50,000 to 80,000 years ago and is only now coming to the surface to make light. However, neutrinos penetrate matter almost without interaction and make it to Earth in only eight minutes from creation. Since neutrinos interact only weakly they are hard to detect; never-the-less within the last ten years neutrino detectors on Earth have started to reliably detect neutrinos from the fusion reactions in the interior of the Sun and scientists have started to use this information to investigate the Sun’s nuclear furnace. Changes in solar neutrino flux make it advantageous to take a neutrino detector into space since the solar neutrino intensity changes dramatically as the inverse square of the distance from the Sun, by five orders of magnitude when going from the Earth to the Sun. Launch of a neutrino detector into space toward the Sun will: a) aim to significantly increase the neutrino flux 10,000x allowing for a smaller detector which improves detector energy resolution and performance, b) attempt to completely eliminate background terrestrial neutrino sources for improved measurement accuracy, and c) conduct unique science experiments near the Sun not achievable with much larger detectors on the Earth. NASA's interest in deep space exploration has been a key factor in its unmanned spacecraft development and launch of exploration science satellites and spacecraft. NASA has done exceptional experiments in space where science benefits from the unique platform of spacecraft that provides unprecedented views. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope is really a small and very common instrument, but when it is put into an orbit high above the Earth, it becomes one of the most powerful optical observatories man has ever made. Moving neutrino observations to space is the next obvious step. The concept of putting a neutrino detector in close orbit of the sun is completely unexplored and innovative. Its scientific return is to vastly enhance the understanding of the solar interior which is a NASA major goal as stated in the decadal survey. Preliminary calculations show that such a spacecraft if properly shielded, can operate in this environment both taking data of neutrino interactions which can be distinguished from random background rates of solar Electromagnetic emissions, Galactic charged cosmic-ray, and gamma-rays by using a double pulsed signature. The NIAC Phase-1 simulations have shown this idea to be very successful in eliminating background and identifying the neutrino interaction signal, hence this spacecraft detector concept once demonstrated to be Technical Readiness Level 7 and flight mission-ready would enable a whole new type of mission to explore and study our Sun, in details that could neither be done with the largest neutrino detectors on Earth nor other types of space-craft measurements that are not using neutrino detection. Our goal in this NIAC Phase-2 was to take the detector simulation ideas and construct a prototype for testing in the lab with tagged sources to evaluate and demonstrate that the performance in the simulations are borne out by a prototype.

Neutrino↗
DOE OSTI2025

Searching for Sterile Neutrinos In the NOvA Experiment and Measurements of Hadronic Energy Response with NOvA Test Beam Data

The NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance) experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment composed of two functionally identical detectors: a 300-ton Near Detector and a 14-kton Far Detector, separated by 809 km and placed 14 mrad off the axis of the NuMI neutrino beam created at Fermilab. This configuration enables NOvA’s rich neutrino physics program, which includes measuring neutrino mixing parameters, determining the neutrino mass hierarchy, probing CP violation in the leptonic sector, studying neutrino cross sections, searching for sterile neutrinos, and more.\\ In this thesis I will present two independent analyses developed within the NOvA experiment. The first is a search for light sterile neutrino oscillations in the 3+1 framework using $\nu_\mu$-CC and NC samples from the NOvA Near and Far Detectors. Light sterile neutrinos are hypothetical neutral leptons that do not participate in the weak interactions but can mix with the three known active neutrinos: $\nu_e$, $\nu_\mu$, and $\nu_\tau$. Anomalous results, such as $\nu_e$/$\bar{\nu}e$ appearance in a $\nu_\mu$ ($\bar{\nu}_\mu$) beam observed by the MiniBooNE and LSND experiments, can be explained by the existence of sterile neutrinos. Thus, proving the existence of this type of neutrino is essential. The latest results of these searches in the NOvA experiment, along with contributions to this effort, will be presented.\\ The second is the first measurement of the pion energy response using data from the NOvA Test Beam experiment. The NOvA Test Beam experiment, deployed at Fermilab, uses a scaled-down 30-ton NOvA detector to analyze tagged beamline particles. The beamline can select and identify electrons, muons, pions, kaons, and protons with momenta ranging from 0.4 to 1.4 GeV/c. Pions are an important component of the hadronic system in neutrino interactions, and understanding how the detector responds to these particles is crucial for the validation of the simulation and the reduction of detector calibration uncertainties, which remain one of the largest systematic uncertainties in NOvA analyses.

Dueñas Tonguino, David Francisco [Cincinnati U.] (↗
DOE OSTI2025

Once-in-a-lifetime encounter models for neutrino media. II. Quasisteady states and miscidynamic flavor evolution

We extended the once-in-a-lifetime encounter (OILE) model to stochastic interactions among neutrinos. As in the original OILE model, the new model reproduces the mean-field behavior of a dense neutrino gas for time 𝑡 ≲ (𝜇⁢𝛾) −1 , where 𝜇 measures the strength of the mean-field neutrino self-interaction potential and is proportional to the neutrino density, and the dimensionless “impact parameter” 𝛾 is a measure of the change in the flavor quantum state of a neutrino during interaction with another neutrino when the wave packets of the two neutrinos overlap. As in the mean-field case, the OILE model with random neutrino velocities experiences kinetic flavor decoherence as the flavor quantum states of the neutrinos diverge from each other. Unlike the mean-field case, however, the OILE model has a “collision term” due to the quantum entanglement among neutrinos. For 𝛾 ≪ 1, this incoherent effect can drive the neutrinos into a quasisteady state that is similar to the collective precession mode in a homogeneous and isotropic neutrino gas in the mean-field approximation. Subsequently, the collision term drives the neutrino gas adiabatically through different quasisteady states and eventually to flavor equilibration. This process is an example of miscidynamic flavor evolution, with the mixing equilibria being the quasisteady precession states.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Time-integrated Southern-sky Neutrino Source Searches with 10 yr of IceCube Starting-track Events at Energies Down to 1 TeV

In the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a signal of astrophysical neutrinos is obscured by backgrounds from atmospheric neutrinos and muons produced in cosmic-ray interactions. IceCube event selections used to isolate the astrophysical neutrino signal often focus on the morphology of the light patterns recorded by the detector. The analyses presented here use the new IceCube Enhanced Starting Track Event Selection (ESTES), which identifies events likely generated by muon–neutrino interactions within the detector geometry, focusing on neutrino energies of 1–500 TeV with a median angular resolution of 1.4°. Selecting for starting-track events filters out not only the atmospheric-muon background but also the atmospheric-neutrino background in the southern sky. This improves IceCube’s muon–neutrino sensitivity to southern-sky neutrino sources, especially for Galactic sources that are not expected to produce a substantial flux of neutrinos above 100 TeV. In this work, the ESTES sample was applied for the first time to search for astrophysical sources of neutrinos, including a search for diffuse neutrino emission from the Galactic plane. No significant excesses were identified from any of the analyses; however, constraining limits are set on the hadronic emission from TeV gamma-ray Galactic plane objects and models of the diffuse Galactic plane neutrino flux.

Abbasi, R. [Loyola University, Chicago, IL (United↗
DOE OSTI2025

Three-flavor collective neutrino oscillation simulations on a qubit quantum annealer

Neutrinos are unique among elementary particles in that their flavor-compositions oscillate over time. In extreme environments such as core-collapse supernovae, neutron-star mergers, and the early Universe, neutrinos are dense enough that their self-interactions significantly affect, if not dominate, these oscillations. This has implications for several phenomena within these environments, particularly nucleosynthesis. Simulations of these self-interactions have traditionally approximated neutrinos as having two flavors instead of the physical three. In order to develop techniques for characterizing the resulting quantum entanglement, I present the results of simulations of neutrino-neutrino interactions that include all three physical neutrino flavors and were performed on D-Wave Inc.’s Advantage 5000+ qubit quantum annealer. These results are checked against those from exact classical simulations, which are also used to compare the neutrino-neutrino interactions to neutrino-antineutrino and interactions between Majorana neutrinos, which are their own antiparticles. The D-Wave Advantage annealer is shown to be able to reproduce time evolution with the precision of a classical machine for small numbers of neutrinos and to do so without the Trotter errors present in most simulations of dynamics on quantum devices. Furthermore, it suffers from poor scaling in qubit-count with the number of neutrinos.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Exploring entanglement and spectral split correlations in three-flavor collective neutrino oscillations

In environments with prodigious numbers of neutrinos, such as core-collapse supernovae, neutron star mergers, or the early Universe, neutrino-neutrino interactions are dynamically significant. They can dominate neutrino flavor evolution and force it to be nonlinear, causing collective neutrino oscillations. Such collective oscillations have been studied numerically, for systems with up to millions of neutrinos, using mean-field or one-particle effective approximations. However, such a system of interacting neutrinos is a quantum many-body system, wherein quantum correlations could play a significant role in the flavor evolution—thereby motivating the exploration of many-body treatments that follow the time evolution of these correlations. In many-body flavor evolution calculations with two neutrino flavors, the emergence of spectral splits in the neutrino energy distributions has been found to be correlated with the degree of quantum entanglement across the spectrum. In this work, for the first time, we investigate the emergence of spectral splits in the three-flavor many-body collective neutrino oscillations. We find that the emergence of spectral splits resembles the number and location found in the mean-field approximation but not in the width. Moreover, unlike in the two-flavor many-body calculations, we find that additional degrees of freedom make it more difficult to establish a correlation between the location of the spectral splits and the degree of quantum entanglement across the neutrino energy spectrum. The observation from the two-flavor case, that neutrinos nearest to the spectral split frequency exhibit the highest level of entanglement, is more difficult to ascertain in the three-flavor case because of the presence of multiple spectral splits across different pairwise combinations of flavor and/or mass states. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Constraints on neutrino physics from DESI DR2 BAO and DR1 full shape

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Collaboration has obtained robust measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations in the redshift range 0.1 < 𝑧 < 4.2, based on the Lyman-𝛼 forest and galaxies from data release 2. We combine these measurements with cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from Planck and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to place our tightest constraints yet on the sum of neutrino masses. Assuming the cosmological Λ⁢ CDM model and three degenerate neutrino states, we find ∑𝑚 𝜈 < 0.0642 eV (95%) with a marginalized error of 𝜎⁡(∑𝑚 𝜈 ) = 0.020 eV. We also constrain the effective number of neutrino species, finding 𝑁 eff = 3.2⁢3$^{+0.35}_{−0.34}$ (95%), in line with the Standard Model prediction. When accounting for neutrino oscillation constraints, we find a preference for the normal mass ordering and an upper limit on the lightest neutrino mass of 𝑚 𝑙 < 0.023 eV (95%). However, we determine using frequentist and Bayesian methods that our constraints are in tension with the lower limits derived from neutrino oscillations. Correcting for the physical boundary at zero mass, we report a 95% Feldman-Cousins upper limit of ∑𝑚 𝜈 < 0.053 eV, breaching the lower limit from neutrino oscillations. Considering a more general Bayesian analysis with an effective cosmological neutrino mass parameter, ∑𝑚 𝜈,eff , that allows for negative energy densities and removes unsatisfactory prior weight effects, we derive constraints that are in 3⁢𝜎 tension with the same oscillation limit, while the error rises to 𝜎⁡(∑𝑚 𝜈,eff ) = 0.053 eV. In the absence of unknown systematics, this finding could be interpreted as a hint of new physics not necessarily related to neutrinos. The preference of DESI and CMB data for an evolving dark energy model offers one possible solution. In the 𝑤 0 ⁢𝑤 𝑎 ⁢CDM model, we find ∑𝑚 𝜈 < 0.163 eV (95%), relaxing the neutrino tension. These constraints all rely on the effects of neutrinos on the cosmic expansion history. Using full-shape power spectrum measurements of data release 1 galaxies, we place complementary constraints that rely on neutrino free streaming. Our strongest such limit in Λ ⁢CDM, using selected CMB priors, is ∑𝑚 𝜈 < 0.193 eV (95%).

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Status and perspectives of the ICARUS experiment at the Fermilab Short Baseline Neutrino program

In this study, the ICARUS collaboration has employed the 760 t T600 detector in a successful three-year physics run at the underground LNGS laboratory, performing a sensitive search for LSND-like anomalous ν e appearance in the CERN Neutrino to Gran Sasso beam, which contributed to the constraints on the allowed neutrino oscillation parameters to a narrow region around Δm 2 ~ 1 eV 2 . After a significant overhaul at CERN, the T600 detector has been installed at Fermilab. In 2020 the cryogenic commissioning began with detector cool down, liquid Argon filling and recirculation. ICARUS then started its operation collecting the first neutrino events from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) and the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam off-axis, which were used to test the ICARUS event selection, reconstruction and analysis algorithms. ICARUS successfully completed its commissioning phase in June 2022, moving then to data taking for neutrino oscillation physics, aiming at first to either confirm or refute the claim by Neutrino-4 short-baseline reactor. ICARUS will also jointly search for evidence of sterile neutrinos together with the Short-Baseline Near Detector, within the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino program experiment, and will perform measurements of neutrino cross sections with both beams and several Beyond Standard Model searches with the NuMI beam. In this paper, the main technical achievements of the ICARUS detector subsystems (Time Projection Chambers, Light Detection System, Cosmic Ray Tagger, Trigger and Data Acquisition) obtained with both BNB and NuMI neutrino beams during the commissioning phase, will be presented in terms of the overall detector performance and capability to select and reconstruct neutrino events.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Sterile-neutrino search based on 259 days of KATRIN data

Neutrinos are the most abundant fundamental matter particles in the Universe and play a crucial part in particle physics and cosmology. Neutrino oscillation, discovered about 25 years ago, shows that the three known species mix with each other. Anomalous results from reactor and radioactive-source experiments suggest a possible fourth neutrino state, the sterile neutrino, which does not interact through the weak force. The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment, primarily designed to measure the neutrino mass using tritium β-decay, also searches for sterile neutrinos suggested by these anomalies. A sterile-neutrino signal would appear as a distortion in the β-decay energy spectrum, characterized by a discontinuity in curvature (kink) related to the sterile-neutrino mass. This signature, which depends only on the shape of the spectrum rather than its absolute normalization, offers a robust, complementary approach to reactor experiments. Here we report the analysis of the energy spectrum of 36 million tritium β-decay electrons recorded in 259 measurement days within the last 40 eV below the endpoint. The results exclude a substantial part of the parameter space suggested by the gallium anomaly and challenge the Neutrino-4 claim. Together with other neutrino-disappearance experiments, KATRIN probes sterile-to-active mass splittings from a fraction of an eV 2 to several hundred eV 2 , excluding light sterile neutrinos with mixing angles above a few per cent.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

The "Fake" Supernova Neutrinos of SBND: Using Muons Decaying at Rest to Study the Charged Current MeV-Scale $V_e$-Ar Cross Section

In a Type-II core collapse supernova, 99% of the total amount of energy is released in the form of neutrinos. However, the nearest supernova explosion in the last few hundred years was in 1987, over thirty years ago. It was also the first from which particle detectors around the world managed to detect the neutrino flux, yielding important information about their properties and the explosion mechanism. Neutrinos are the most weakly interacting subatomic fundamental particles known to date, and they act as a cooling mechanism for the star. Out of the six neutrino flavours currently known, the majority exiting the explosion are electron neutrinos, ve. Neutrino experiments using liquid argon (LAr) as their detector medium are unique at probing this specific channel. In the meantime, however, until the next explosion, we can still practise for the big event. With the Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) experiment at Fermilab, we can study how electron neutrinos of the same energy coming from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) interact in LAr, and measure the cross section. As BNB measurements are mostly tailored to higher energy neutrinos, I will present an overview of how SBND is aiming to select the low-energy neutrino candidates from muons Decaying At Rest (DAR) in the absorber and target within the BNB beam pipe. This is not a straightforward feat, encompassing special difficulties that include beam and flux systematic uncertainty simulation, system trigger needs and particular reconstruction efforts, and so I will present how each challenge is being addressed in SBND. This will be a novel measurement in the neutrino particle physics community, and will prove fundamental for the next generation of supernova neutrino detectors.

Kotsiopoulou, Lucy [Edinburgh U.]↗
DOE OSTI2025

First Observation of Neutrino Candidates in ProtoDUNE

The Neutrino Platform at CERN hosts two massive prototypes for the DUNE Far Detector to test the technology for the coming Horizontal Drift and Vertical Drift designs, almost perfectly on axis with the direction of the SPS beamline pointed towards the North Area. The 400 GeV/c SPS protons impacting on the T2 target area may produce exotic particles that could travel ~700 meters to the detectors, in addition to a substantial flux of neutrinos. Simulations of the neutrino flux demonstrate that thousands of neutrino interactions are expected per week in the active volume of NP04 spanning energies from a few GeV up to 180 GeV, constituting the main background for such search. The first step towards establishing a BSM physics program at the Neutrino Platform is therefore to observe neutrinos originating from the SPS beam. A sample of high-energy neutrino events in a DUNE FD-like LArTPC may also be of broader use to the DUNE collaboration. For example, by testing the performance of reconstruction algorithms on highly-energetic neutrino interactions with large hadronic showers. An initial neutrino search was performed by developing filters to remove cosmic events. After filtering, the remaining events were eye-scanned to identify neutrino candidates amongst the residual cosmic background. Over two of the available NP04 runs, 29 neutrino candidates were identified. A separate run taken with the SPS beam off yielded no neutrino candidates. An analysis is now under development that will use all available data, large Monte Carlo samples and full event reconstruction, with the aim of confirming whether NP04 is capable of observing feebly interacting particles originating from the SPS beam.

Pullia, Dario [CERN]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics at Colliders

Nonzero neutrino masses guarantee new physics and neutrinos are excellent probes of extreme environments in the Universe. The recent collider neutrino experimental program, including FASER$ν$ and SND@LHC, along with the planned Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, is opening a new window into neutrino physics and astrophysics. In this article, we review recent achievements and prospects of collider neutrino experiments, including key achievements such as the first measurements of collider neutrino interactions at unprecedented energies and the exploration of new physics scenarios, like dark matter candidates, sterile neutrinos, and non-standard neutrino interactions. For concreteness, we will focus on the significant scientific opportunities presented by the Forward Physics Facility, which will enable precision measurements of neutrino cross sections and proton structure at low parton momentum fraction. Furthermore, collider neutrino studies will substantially reduce systematic uncertainties in calculating atmospheric neutrino fluxes, thereby improving astrophysical neutrino observations as well as advancing our understanding of cosmic-ray interactions.

Machado, Pedro [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000291187354)↗
DOE OSTI2026

Investigating Interference Term in DUNE And SBND Neutrino Interactions with ACHILLES

Understanding neutrino-nucleus interactions is critical for conducting precise neutrino oscillation ex- periments. However, uncertainties in neutrino-nucleus cross section measurements and our incomplete understanding of nuclear effects remain a significant challenge in neutrino physics. In this paper, we investigate contributions from quantum interference between one-body and two-body interactions in charged-current quasi-elastic (CCQE) neutrino scattering amplitudes, using the ACHILLES event gen- erator. Simulations are performed using muon neutrino flux from Fermilab’s Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB), as well as Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) flux. We observe the neutrino flux interact- ing with Argon nuclei as detected by the Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) and DUNE Near Detector (DUNE-ND), both Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPC). We focus on one muon and one proton final states with cascade interactions. We analyze multiple experimental observables including outgoing kinematic variables, energy-momentum transfer variables, and Transverse Kinematic Imbalance (TKI) variables. In this study, we also investigate the effects of PRISM (a method of sampling flux from multiple off-axis angles which creates different neutrino energy spectra). We find that the ratio of in- terference to quasi-elastic contributions gives a non-flat distribution across a 0-3.5 GeV energy range, indicating that effects of interference vary with the neutrino energy sampled. Our ultimate goal is to reduce systematic uncertainties from neutrino interactions when conducting oscillation experiments by working to disentangle the effects of quantum interference from the quasi-elastic signature.

Serumaga, Peera [Fermilab; UC, San Diego] (ORCID:0↗
DOE OSTI2026

Widen the resonance at ultra-high energies: novel probes of neutrino self-interactions in the high-mass regime

Neutrino self-interactions beyond the Standard Model are well motivated by the nonzero masses of neutrinos, which are the only known particles guaranteed to have new physics. Meanwhile, cosmic messengers, especially neutrinos, play a central role in probing new physics, as they provide experimental conditions far beyond the reach of laboratories and serve as the link between laboratory fundamental-physics discoveries and their roles in the Universe, where many new physics motivations originate.In this work, we propose a novel probe of neutrino self-interactions through ultrahigh-energy neutrinos scattering off the cosmic neutrino background when the lightest neutrino species remains relativistic today.This allows us to “Widen the Resonance” of such scattering [1].In addition, we also provide a semi-analytic framework for cosmogenic ultrahigh-energy neutrino production, avoiding computationally intensive simulations and yielding results precise enough for beyond-the-standard-model studies.The widened resonance enables future ultrahigh-energy neutrino telescopes,in particular GRAND, to probe mediator masses from MeV to GeV, reaching couplings down to g ∼ 10$^{-3}$ — up to two orders of magnitude beyond current bounds.Our results enhance the discovery potential of neutrino self-interactions in the high-mass regime, potentially offering crucial insights into the connections between the neutrino sector and dark sector.

Machado, Pedro A.N. [Fermilab] (ORCID:000000029118↗
DOE OSTI2024

Evaluating the Effects of Detector Modeling Uncertainties on Sterile Neutrino Oscillation Analysis with the ICARUS Detector

he ICARUS T600 LArTPC detector was refurbished after an initial run at the underground LNGS labs and is currently taking data within its experimental hall at Fermilab after full commissioning. Regular data taking began in May 2021 with neutrinos from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) and the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) off-axis beam. As the far detector of the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program, the ICARUS detector's capability in searching for both muon neutrino disappearance and electron neutrino appearance will allow for unprecedented sensitivity to light sterile neutrinos with eV-scale mass. The ultimate sensitivity of the detector to sterile neutrino oscillations depends on the understanding of the detector response and the uncertainties remaining after calibrating the detector model. This poster will review how detector-model-related uncertainties are quantified, evaluated and their impact on expected sterile neutrino oscillation sensitivities using the existing ICARUS data. The work pursued here is broadly applicable to other ICARUS analysis pathways such as neutrino-argon cross-sections and Beyond the Standard Model physics searches. It will finally discuss improvement pathways to reduce the systematic uncertainties to the level needed for the joint sterile neutrino oscillation analysis with the Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) within the SBN Program.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Search for a Sterile Neutrino in a 3+1 Framework using Wire-Cell Inclusive Charged-Current $\nu_e$ Selection with the BNB and NuMI beamlines in MicroBooNE

A search for a sterile neutrino is being carried out in the MicroBooNE experiment within the 3+1 (three flavors of active neutrinos + one flavor of sterile neutrino) framework using neutrinos from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) and the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI). The sensitivity of this search is built upon high performance inclusive charged-current electron neutrino and muon neutrino event selections. The previous 3+1 sterile neutrino search using only BNB data, the cancellation between $\nu_{e}$ disappearance and $\nu_{e}$ appearance oscillations led to a reduced oscillation effect in the $\nu_{e}$ energy spectrum resulting in a degeneracy of the oscillation parameters. Such a degeneracy is shown to be mitigated by including the neutrino events from the NuMI beam. In this note, the prospect of a 3+1 oscillation analysis using both BNB and NuMI is reported, considerably improving the sensitivity to 3+1 neutrino oscillations.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗