English

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 (3+1)(3+1) framework, consisting of three active and one sterile neutrino state. We focus on the regime where the new mass-squared splitting satisfies Δm4121\Delta m_{41}^{2} \lesssim 1 eV2^{2}, 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.

Keywords

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}
}