Abstract
We study the consequences of invisible decay of neutrinos in the context of the DUNE experiment. We assume that the third mass eigenstate is unstable and decays to a light sterile neutrino and a scalar or a pseudo-scalar. We consider DUNE running in 5 years neutrino and 5 years antineutrino mode and a detector volume of 40 kt. We obtain the expected sensitivity on the rest-frame life-time τ3 normalized to the mass m3 as τ3/m3 > 4.50 × 10−11 s/eV at 90% C.L. for a normal hierarchical mass spectrum. We also find that DUNE can discover neutrino decay for τ3/m3 > 4.27 × 10−11 s/eV at 90% C.L. In addition, for an unstable ν3 with an illustrative value of τ3/m3 = 1.2 × 10−11 s/eV, the no decay case could get disfavoured at the 3σ C.L. At 90% C.L. the expected precision range for this true value is obtained as 1.71 × 10−11 > τ3/m3 > 9.29 × 10−12 in units of s/eV. We also study the correlation between a non-zero τ3/m3 and standard oscillation parameters and find an interesting correlation in the appearance and disappearance channels with the mixing angle θ23. This alters the octant sensitivity of DUNE, favorably (unfavorably) for true θ23 in the lower (higher) octant. The effect of a decaying neutrino does not alter the hierarchy or CP violation discovery sensitivity of DUNE in a discernible way.
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Choubey, S., Goswami, S. & Pramanik, D. A study of invisible neutrino decay at DUNE and its effects on θ23 measurement. J. High Energ. Phys. 2018, 55 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2018)055
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2018)055