Icecube/DeepCore tests for novel explanations of the MiniBooNE anomaly

Understand

While the low-energy excess observed at MiniBooNE remains unchallenged, it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile it with the results from other sterile neutrino searches and cosmology.

• Recently, it has been shown that non-minimal models with new particles in a hidden sector could provide a better fit to the data.
• As their main ingredients they require a GeV-scale $Z'$, kinetically mixed with the photon, and an unstable heavy neutrino with a mass in the 150 MeV range that mixes with the light neutrinos.
• In this letter we point out that atmospheric neutrino experiments (and, in particular, IceCube/DeepCore) could probe a significant fraction of the parameter space of such models by looking for an excess of "double-bang" events at low energies, as proposed in our previous work (arXiv:1707.08573).