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Editors’ picks 2023

No sign of sterile neutrinos but anomalies remain

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

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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.

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References

Original article

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

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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 

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

    Iulia Georgescu

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  1. Iulia Georgescu
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Correspondence to Iulia Georgescu.

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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

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

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