Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Research Highlight
  • Published:

Editors’ picks 2023

No sign of sterile neutrinos but anomalies remain

Nature Reviews Physics volume 6, page 84 (2024)Cite this article

Subjects

Neutrinos come in three flavours — electron, muon and tau — but they keep changing flavour as they travel through space, a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations. Several experiments studying this effect, in particular, looking at antineutrino spectra emitted by nuclear reactors, have reported anomalies: measurements did not match the theoretical predictions. A possible explanation for the discrepancy would be the existence of a fourth neutrino flavour. This hypothetical particle, dubbed the sterile neutrino, would not interact through the weak interaction. Furthermore, sterile neutrinos could potentially be the constituents of dark matter, solving an even bigger puzzle. But alas, no sign of sterile neutrinos was found in the latest, and most extensive, analysis done on data taken by the STEREO experiment at Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France. And yet, the anomaly remains.

In this case, the reactor antineutrino anomaly is likely to originate from biases in the nuclear experimental data used for the theoretical predictions. Whereas other analyses of neutrino-oscillation experiments such as that of the MicroBooNE Collaboration fit with this conclusion, a few other anomalies remain in the data that could be explained by the existence of a sterile neutrino. The case is not yet closed.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

References

Original article

  • The STEREO Collaboration. STEREO neutrino spectrum of 235U fission rejects sterile neutrino hypothesis. Nature 613, 257–261 (2023)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

Related article

  • Abratenko, P. et al. (MicroBooNE Collaboration). First constraints on light sterile neutrino oscillations from combined appearance and disappearance searches with the MicroBooNE detector. Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 011801 (2023)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Iulia Georgescu

Authors
  1. Iulia Georgescu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Iulia Georgescu.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Georgescu, I. No sign of sterile neutrinos but anomalies remain. Nat Rev Phys 6, 84 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00694-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00694-4

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing