Statistical significance of reactor antineutrino active-sterile oscillations

Abstract

We performed Monte Carlo calculations of the statistical distribution of the ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{2}$ test statistic used in the analysis of the data of the NEOS, DANSS, Bugey-3, and PROSPECT short-baseline reactor experiments. We show that the statistical significance of the NEOS and DANSS indications in favor of active-sterile neutrino oscillations is smaller than that obtained with the usual method based on the ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{2}$ distribution. In the combined analysis of the data of the four experiments we find that the statistical significance of active-sterile neutrino oscillations is reduced from $2.4\ensuremath{\sigma}$ to $1.8\ensuremath{\sigma}$.

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