skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Revisiting leptonic nonunitarity
In the presence of extra neutrino states at high scales, the low-energy effective 3 × 3 leptonic mixing matrix (LMM) is in general nonunitary. We revisit the question of what is our current knowledge of individual LMM matrix elements without assuming unitarity. We first demonstrate that a minimal set of experimental constraints suffices in bounding LMM nonunitarity parameters to the level of O ( 10 3 ) , without the use of neutrino oscillation data. We then revisit oscillation results as a complementary cross-check, using different physics and different experimental techniques to probe a similar parameter space. We correct some common misconceptions in the neutrino nonunitarity literature resulting from an incautious treatment of input parameters. We find that neutrino oscillation experiments can constrain LMM nonclosure, but, contrary to claims in the literature, are completely insensitive to the overall normalization of the LMM. Thus, we conclude that oscillation experiments, including the future DUNE experiment, have no power in excluding nonunitarity altogether. Published by the American Physical Society2024  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2014071
PAR ID:
10557018
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Phys.Rev.D 109 (2024) 5, 055006
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Physical Review D
Volume:
109
Issue:
5
ISSN:
2470-0010
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. The Super-Kamiokande and T2K Collaborations present a joint measurement of neutrino oscillation parameters from their atmospheric and beam neutrino data. It uses a common interaction model for events overlapping in neutrino energy and correlated detector systematic uncertainties between the two datasets, which are found to be compatible. Using 3244.4 days of atmospheric data and a beam exposure of 19.7 ( 16.3 ) × 10 20 protons on target in (anti)neutrino mode, the analysis finds a 1.9 σ exclusion of C P conservation (defined as J C P = 0 ) and a 1.2 σ exclusion of the inverted mass ordering. Published by the American Physical Society2025 
    more » « less
  2. We present a search for an eV-scale sterile neutrino using 7.5 years of data from the IceCube DeepCore detector. The analysis uses a sample of 21,914 events with energies between 5 and 150 GeV to search for sterile neutrinos through atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance. Improvements in event selection and treatment of systematic uncertainties provide greater statistical power compared to previous DeepCore sterile neutrino searches. Our results are compatible with the absence of mixing between active and sterile neutrino states, and we place constraints on the mixing matrix elements | U μ 4 | 2 < 0.0534 and | U τ 4 | 2 < 0.0574 at 90% CL under the assumption that Δ m 41 2 1 eV 2 . These null results add to the growing tension between anomalous appearance results and constraints from disappearance searches in the 3 + 1 sterile neutrino landscape. Published by the American Physical Society2024 
    more » « less
  3. This Letter presents the result of a 3 + 1 sterile neutrino search using 10.7 yr of IceCube data. We analyze atmospheric muon neutrinos that traverse the Earth with energies ranging from 0.5 to 100 TeV, incorporating significant improvements in modeling neutrino flux and detector response compared to earlier studies. Notably, for the first time, we categorize data into starting and throughgoing events, distinguishing neutrino interactions with vertices inside or outside the instrumented volume, to improve energy resolution. The best-fit point for a 3 + 1 model is found to be at sin 2 ( 2 θ 24 ) = 0.16 and Δ m 41 2 = 3.5 eV 2 , which agrees with previous iterations of this Letter. The result is consistent with the null hypothesis of no sterile neutrinos with a p value of 3.1%. Published by the American Physical Society2024 
    more » « less
  4. We measure the branching fraction of the decay B D 0 ρ ( 770 ) using data collected with the Belle II detector. The data contain 387 million B B ¯ pairs produced in e + e collisions at the ϒ ( 4 S ) resonance. We reconstruct 8360 ± 180 decays from an analysis of the distributions of the B energy and the ρ ( 770 ) helicity angle. We determine the branching fraction to be ( 0.939 ± 0.021 ( stat ) ± 0.050 ( syst ) ) % , in agreement with previous results. Our measurement improves the relative precision of the world average by more than a factor of two. Published by the American Physical Society2024 
    more » « less
  5. We measure the complete set of angular coefficients J i for exclusive B ¯ D * ν ¯ decays ( = e , μ ). Our analysis uses the full 711 fb 1 Belle dataset with hadronic tag-side reconstruction. The results allow us to extract the form factors describing the B ¯ D * transition and the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element | V cb | . Using recent lattice QCD calculations for the hadronic form factors, we find | V cb | = ( 40.7 ± 0.7 ) × 10 3 using the Boyd-Grinstein-Lebed parametrization, compatible with determinations from inclusive semileptonic decays. We search for lepton flavor universality violation as a function of the hadronic recoil parameter w and investigate the differences of the electron and muon angular distributions. We find no deviation from standard model expectations. Published by the American Physical Society2024 
    more » « less