Search for electron neutrino appearance in a 250 km long-baseline experiment

We present a search for electron neutrino appearance from accelerator produced muon neutrinos in the K2K long baseline neutrino experiment. One candidate event is found in the data corresponding to an exposure of 4.8*10^19 protons on target. The expected background in the absence of neutrino oscillations is estimated to be 2.4+-0.6 events and is dominated by mis-identification of events from neutral current pi^0 production. We exclude the \nu_\mu to \nu_e oscillations at 90% C.L. for the effective mixing angle in 2-flavor approximation of sin^2(2theta_\mu_e) (~= 1/2 sin^2 2 th_13) > 0.15 at Delta m^2_\mu_e = 2.8*10^{-3} eV^2, the best fit value of the \nu_\mu disappearance analysis in K2K. The most stringent limit of sin^2(2theta_\mu_e) < 0.09 is obtained at Delta m^2_\mu_e = 6*10^{-3} eV^2.