A bstract We evaluate the statistical significance of the 3+1 sterile-neutrino hypothesis using ν e and $$ \overline{\nu} $$ ν ¯ e disappearance data from reactor, solar and gallium radioactive source experiments. Concerning the latter, we investigate the implications of the recent BEST results. For reactor data we focus on relative measurements independent of flux predictions. For the problem at hand, the usual χ 2 -approximation to hypothesis testing based on Wilks’ theorem has been shown in the literature to be inaccurate. We therefore present results based on Monte Carlo simulations, and find that this typically reduces the significance by roughly 1 σ with respect to the naïve expectation. We find no significant indication in favor of sterile-neutrino oscillations from reactor data. On the other hand, gallium data (dominated by the BEST result) show more than 5 σ of evidence supporting the sterile-neutrino hypothesis, favoring oscillation parameters in agreement with constraints from reactor data. This explanation is, however, in significant tension (∼ 3 σ ) with solar neutrino experiments. In order to assess the robustness of the signal for gallium experiments we present a discussion of the impact of cross-section uncertainties on the results.
Grid-based minimization at scale: Feldman-Cousins corrections for light sterile neutrino search
High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments generally employ sophisticated statistical methods to present results in searches of new physics. In the problem of searching for sterile neutrinos, likelihood ratio tests are applied to short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments to construct confidence intervals for the parameters of interest. The test statistics of the form Δχ 2 is often used to form the confidence intervals, however, this approach can lead to statistical inaccuracies due to the small signal rate in the region-of-interest. In this paper, we present a computational model for the computationally expensive Feldman-Cousins corrections to construct a statistically accurate confidence interval for neutrino oscillation analysis. The program performs a grid-based minimization over oscillation parameters and is written in C++. Our algorithms make use of vectorization through Eigen3, yielding a single-core speed-up of 350 compared to the original implementation, and achieve MPI data parallelism by employing DIY. We demonstrate the strong scaling of the application at High-Performance Computing (HPC) sites. We utilize HDF5 along with HighFive to write the results of the calculation to file.
- Editors:
- Biscarat, C.; Campana, S.; Hegner, B.; Roiser, S.; Rovelli, C.I.; Stewart, G.A.
- Award ID(s):
- 2013070
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10338866
- Journal Name:
- EPJ Web of Conferences
- Volume:
- 251
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 02065
- ISSN:
- 2100-014X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202125102065
