Searches for Sterile Neutrinos with the IceCube Detector

Abstract

The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous ${\nu }_{\mu }$ or ${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$ disappearance is observed in either of two independently developed analyses, each using one year of atmospheric neutrino data. New exclusion limits are placed on the parameter space of the $3+1$ model, in which muon antineutrinos experience a strong Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein-resonant oscillation. The exclusion limits extend to ${\sin }^{2}2{\theta }_{24}\le 0.02$ at $\mathrm{\Delta }{m}^2\sim 0.3{\mathrm{eV}}^2$ at the 90% confidence level. The allowed region from global analysis of appearance experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE, is excluded at approximately the 99% confidence level for the global best-fit value of $|U_{e4}{|}^2$.