Sterile Neutrinos and IceCube

Understand

Although the framework for oscillations of the three neutrino flavors in the Standard Model has been convincingly established, indications persist that it may be incomplete.

• Challenges are coming from the LSND and MiniBooNe short-baseline experiments, from the neutrino sources used in the Gallex and Sage solar neutrino experiments and, more recently,from an a-posteriori analysis of reactor neutrino experiments.
• One way to accommodate the reported "anomalies", if real, is to introduce one or more sterile neutrinos in the mass range $\delta m^2 \sim 1 eV^2$.
• TeV atmospheric neutrinos propagating through the Earth undergo resonant oscillations in the presence of sterile neutrinos; a clear signature in a neutrino telescope like IceCube is the the change in shape of the zenith-energy distribution of the atmospheric neutrinos.