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  • Open Access

Sensitivity of Hyper-Kamiokande to sub-eV sterile neutrinos

Emilse Cabrera*, Arman Esmaili†, Hiroshi Nunokawa‡, and Ana Maria Garcia Trzeciak§

  • *Contact author: emilsecc@aluno.puc-rio.br
  • †Contact author: arman@puc-rio.br
  • ‡Contact author: nunokawa@puc-rio.br
  • §Contact author: anatrzeciak@puc-rio.br
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 015017 – Published 20 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/gwpz-wsgj

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the sensitivity of Hyper-Kamiokande (hyper-K) to light sterile neutrinos within the (3+1) framework, consisting of three active and one sterile neutrino state. We focus on the regime where the new mass-squared splitting satisfies Δm412≲1  eV2, 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.

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Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. D 113, 015017– Published 20 January, 2026
  • Received 17 November 2025
  • Accepted 24 December 2025
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