Abstract
Significant evidence exists for the apparent disappearance of electron-type neutrinos in radioactive source experiments. Yet, interpreted within the standard ‘3+1 sterile neutrino scenario’, precision short-baseline measurements of electron antineutrinos from nuclear reactors strongly disagree with these results. Recently, it has been demonstrated that allowing for a finite wavepacket size for the reactor neutrinos can ameliorate such a tension, however the smallness of the required wavepackets is a subject of intense debate. In this work, we demonstrate that a ‘broad’ sterile neutrino may relax this tension in much the same way. Such a phenomenological possibility can arise in plausible hidden sector scenarios, such as a clockwork-style sector, for which we provide a concrete microscopic model.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Toni Bertólez-Martínez for sharing his fitting codes and providing detailed clarification. We are grateful to Joachim Kopp for valuable discussions regarding this work. We also acknowledge Texas A&M University High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) for providing computing resources. KJK and TZ acknowledge support from the United States DOE grant DE-SC0010813. HB acknowledges partial support from the STFC HEP Theory Consolidated grants ST/T000694/1 and ST/X000664/1 and thanks other members of the Cambridge Pheno Working Group for useful discussions.
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Banks, H., Kelly, K.J., McCullough, M. et al. Broad sterile neutrinos & the reactor/gallium tension. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 96 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2024)096
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2024)096