Investigating DUNE oscillations sensitivity to sterile pseudo-Dirac neutrinos

A bstract We explore the sensitivity of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to sterile neutrino oscillations within a 3+(pseudo-Dirac pair) framework. We first consider a pair of two sterile neutrinos forming a pseudo-Dirac pair, then we consider a low-scale seesaw realization, that we name “Linear-Inverse Seesaw” model. This scenario features two nearly degenerate sterile neutrino states at the keV scale, characterized by a small mass splitting arising from a small amount of lepton number violation. In this scenario, the oscillation behavior can be described in three distinct regimes depending on the sterile-sterile mass-squared difference: low (< 1 eV 2 ), resonant (1–100 eV 2 ), and high (> 100 eV 2 ) regimes, recovering in both low- and high-mass regimes an effective non-unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix. A distinctive feature of this framework is that observable effects persist even in the low-mass limit, unlike the case of standard 3 +1 scenarios, due to rapid oscillation averaging from larger keV-scale splittings. We leverage the complementarity of both near and far detectors to explore the sensitivity to ν e and ν μ disappearance and ν e and ν τ appearance oscillation probabilities. Our analysis reveals that DUNE can achieve significant improvements over current experimental constraints, especially in neutrino appearance modes. Additionally, we show that new CP-violating phases associated with the sterile sector can dramatically alter the sensitivity, with destructive interference potentially suppressing signals by orders of magnitude.