Towards a Robust Exclusion of the Sterile-Neutrino Explanation of Short-Baseline Anomalies

The sterile neutrino interpretation of the LSND and MiniBooNE neutrino anomalies is currently being tested at three Liquid Argon detectors: MicroBooNE, SBND, and ICARUS. It has been argued that a degeneracy between νμ→νe and νe→νe oscillations significantly degrades their sensitivity to sterile neutrinos. In this talk we will go through the results of an independent study that uses two methods to eliminate this concern. First, we resolve this degeneracy by including external constraints on νe disappearance from the PROSPECT reactor experiment. Second, by properly analyzing the full three-dimensional parameter space, we demonstrate that the stronger-than-sensitivity exclusion from MicroBooNE alone already covers the entire 2σ preferred regions of MiniBooNE at the level of 2−3σ. We show that upcoming searches at SBND and ICARUS can improve on this beyond the 4σ level, thereby providing a rigorous test of short-baseline anomalies.