eV-scale sterile neutrinos from an extra dimension

Abstract

Motivated by the short-baseline neutrino oscillation anomalies that suggest the existence of sterile neutrinos at the eV scale, we construct a scenario of a seesaw mechanism for 3+1 light neutrinos implemented by warped compactification of an extra dimension. As the seesaw mechanism necessitates at least two right-handed neutrinos at mass scales much larger than eV, incorporating an eV-scale sterile neutrino into a seesaw entails large mass hierarchies among the singlet neutrinos. We show that such hierarchies can be naturally explained by moderate fluctuations of the five-dimensional fermion mass parameters.