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Investigating DUNE oscillations sensitivity to sterile Pseudo-Dirac Neutrinos

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-11-25 v3

Abstract

We explore the sensitivity of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to sterile neutrino oscillations within a 3+3+(pseudo-Dirac pair) framework. We first consider a pair of two sterile neutrinos forming a pseudo-Dirac pair, then we consider a low-scale seesaw realization, that we name ``Linear-Inverse Seesaw" model. This scenario features two nearly degenerate sterile neutrino states at the keV scale, characterized by a small mass splitting arising from a small amount of lepton number violation. In this scenario, the oscillation behavior can be described in three distinct regimes depending on the sterile-sterile mass-squared difference : low (<1eV2< 1\,\mathrm{eV}^2), resonant (11--100eV2100\,\mathrm{eV}^2), and high (>100eV2> 100\,\mathrm{eV}^2) regimes, recovering in both low- and high-mass regimes an effective non-unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix. A distinctive feature of this framework is that observable effects persist even in the low-mass limit, unlike the case of standard 3+13+1 scenarios, due to rapid oscillation averaging from larger keV-scale splittings. We leverage the complementarity of both near and far detectors to explore the sensitivity for νe\nu_e and νμ\nu_\mu disappearance and νe\nu_e and ντ\nu_{\tau} appearance oscillation probabilities. Our analysis reveals that DUNE can achieve significant improvements over current experimental constraints, especially in neutrino appearance modes. Additionally, we show that new CP-violating phases associated with the sterile sector can dramatically alter the sensitivity, with destructive interference potentially suppressing signals by orders of magnitude.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.16390,
  title  = {Investigating DUNE oscillations sensitivity to sterile Pseudo-Dirac Neutrinos},
  author = {Asmaa Abada and João Paulo Pinheiro and Salvador Urrea},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.16390},
  year   = {2025}
}