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

Abstract

Light sterile neutrinos have been introduced as an explanation for a number of oscillation signals at Δm[superscript 2]∼1 eV[superscript 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.