SHORT-BASELINE ACTIVE-STERILE NEUTRINO OSCILLATIONS?

Abstract

We suggest the possibility that the anomalies observed in the LSND experiment and the Gallium radioactive source experiments may be due to neutrino oscillations generated by a large squared-mass difference of about 20–30 eV2. We consider the simplest 3+1 four-neutrino scheme that can accommodate also the observed solar and atmospheric neutrino oscillations. We show that, in this framework, the disappearance of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] in short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments is mainly due to active-sterile transitions. The implications of the first MiniBooNE results, appeared after the completion of this paper, are discussed in an addendum.