Sensitivity of Hyper-Kamiokande to sub-eV Sterile Neutrinos
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2026-01-22 v1
Abstract
In this work, we investigate the sensitivity of Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) to light sterile neutrinos within the framework, consisting of three active and one sterile neutrino state. We focus on the regime where the new mass-squared splitting satisfies eV, a parameter space complementary to short-baseline sterile-neutrino searches. Using both accelerator and atmospheric neutrino samples, we evaluate the expected capability of Hyper-K to constrain active-sterile mixing. Our results show that Hyper-K can significantly improve current bounds on sterile-neutrino parameters and achieve sensitivity that is competitive with that of future dedicated experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.06144,
title = {Sensitivity of Hyper-Kamiokande to sub-eV Sterile Neutrinos},
author = {Emilse Cabrera and Arman Esmaili and Hiroshi Nunokawa and Ana Maria Garcia Trzeciak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.06144},
year = {2026}
}