Observations of neutrino oscillations from the majority of neutrino oscillation experiments are consistent with a three-flavor framework. However, the excess of events seen by LSND and MiniBooNE may be incompatible with this model and require an additional, sterile, neutrino to explain these data with neutrino mixing. These intriguing results are not conclusive and are in tension with findings from other short-baseline and long-baseline experiments.
The NOvA experiment, which uses two functionally identical liquid scintillator detectors over an 810 km baseline in the Fermilab NuMI beam, has the potential to set world-leading limits on the θ24 and θ34 parameters governing sterile neutrino oscillations by searching for a deficit of neutral current interactions compared to that predicted at the two detectors. An updated analysis with the NOvA neutrino beam dataset will be presented along with the first results from a long-baseline sterile search in an antineutrino beam. Limits on the sterile neutrino mixing parameters will be shown and plans for future analyses, including a two-detector joint fit utilizing a covariance matrix to constrain systematics, will be discussed.
