Very Light Sterile Neutrinos at NOvA and T2K

Over the last several years, our understanding of neutrino oscillations has developed significantly due to the long-baseline measurements of muon-neutrino disappearance and muon-to-electron-neutrino appearance at the T2K and NOvA experiments. However, when interpreted under the standard-three-massive-neutrinos paradigm, a tension has emerged between the two experiments' data. Here, we examine whether this tension can be alleviated when a fourth, very light neutrino is added to the picture. Specifically, we focus on the scenario in which this new neutrino has a mass similar to, or even lighter than, the three mostly-active neutrinos that have been identified to date. We find that, for some regions of parameter space, the four-neutrino framework is favored over the three-neutrino one with moderate (a little under two sigma) significance. Interpreting these results, we provide future outlook for near-term and long-term experiments if this four-neutrino framework is indeed true.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, 6 table

Majorana versus Dirac Constraints on the Neutrino Dipole Moments

Massive neutrinos are guaranteed to have nonzero electromagnetic moments and, since there are at least three neutrino species, these dipole moments define a matrix. Here, we estimate the current upper bounds on all independent neutrino electromagnetic moments, concentrating on Earth-bound experiments and measurements with solar neutrinos, including the very recent results reported by XENONnT. We make no simplifying assumptions and compare the hypotheses that neutrinos are Majorana fermions or Dirac fermions. In particular, we fully explore constraints in the Dirac-neutrino parameter space. Majorana and Dirac neutrinos are different; for example, the upper bounds on the magnitudes of the elements of the dipole moment matrix are weaker for Dirac neutrinos, relative to Majorana neutrinos. The potential physics reach of next-generation experiments also depends on the nature of the neutrino. We find that a next-generation experiment two orders of magnitude more sensitive to the neutrino electromagnetic moments via $\nu_{\mu}$ elastic scattering may discover that the neutrino electromagnetic moments are nonzero if the neutrinos are Dirac fermions. Instead, if the neutrinos are Majorana fermions, such a discovery is ruled out by existing solar neutrino data, unless there are more than three light neutrinos.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, 2 table