Sterile Neutrino Discovery Potential of NOvA and DUNE Using Neutral-Current Interactions

Abstract

Sterile neutrino mixing can be studied at long-baseline experiments using neutral-current (NC) data. A reduction in NC event rate is expected in presence of sterile neutrino due to the mixing between sterile and active neutrinos, thus giving direct sensitivity to sterile neutrino channel. In this work, we see that NC channel has good sensitivity to sterile mixing angles at long-baseline. We take current best fit values of NOvA as true values and try to find the extent to which the sterile neutrino parameters will be constrained by the NOvA and DUNE in their future runs.