A Reply to "Comment on 'Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and Active-Sterile Neutrino Mixing: Evidence for Maximal $ν_μ\leftrightarrowν_τ$ Mixing in Super Kamiokande?'"

Abstract

In the paper "Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and Active-Sterile Neutrino Mixing: Evidence for Maximal Muon-Neutrino/Sterile-Neutrino Mixing in Super Kamiokande" (astro-ph/9810075), we suggested that to evade the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis exclusion of the muon neutrino to sterile neutrino oscillation explanation of the Super Kamiokande data, the tau neutrino must have a mass over about 15 eV and it must mix with a lighter sterile neutrino. A stable tau neutrino with this mass is inconsistent with cosmological structure formation. In a comment on our paper (astro-ph/9811067), Foot and Volkas argued that our result is incorrect and that the required tau neutrino mass should be much lower. Here we back up our original result with a more detailed calculation. We show that the argument of Foot and Volkas is invalid, most likely due to an insufficient energy resolution in the low energy part of the neutrino spectrum.