Constraining sterile neutrinos by core-collapse supernovae with multiple detectors

The eV-scale sterile neutrino has been proposed to explain some anomalous results in experiments, such as the deficit of reactor neutrino fluxes and the excess of μ→e in LSND. This hypothesis can be tested by future core-collapse supernova neutrino detection independently since the active-sterile mixing scheme affects the flavor conversion of neutrinos inside the supernova. In this work, we compute the predicted supernova neutrino events in future detectors—DUNE, Hyper-K, and JUNO—for neutrinos emitted during the neutronization burst phase when the luminosity of νe dominates the other flavors. We find that for a supernova occurring within 10 kpc, the difference in the event numbers with and without sterile neutrinos allows to exclude the sterile neutrino hypothesis at more than 99% confidence level robustly. The derived constraints on sterile neutrinos mixing parameters are comparably better than the results from cosmology and on-going or proposed reactor experiments by more than two orders of magnitude in the sin22θ14–Δ m412 plane.