Searching for sterile neutrinos in ice

Oscillation interpretation of the results from the LSND, MiniBooNE and some other experiments requires existence of sterile neutrino with mass similar to 1 eV and mixing with the active neutrinos vertical bar U-mu 0 vertical bar(2) similar to (0.02 - 0.04). It has been realized some time ago that existence of such a neutrino affects significantly the fluxes of atmospheric neutrinos in the TeV range which can be tested by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. In view of the first IceCube data release we have revisited the oscillations of high energy atmospheric neutrinos in the presence of one sterile neutrino. Properties of the oscillation probabilities are studied in details for various mixing schemes both analytically and numerically. The energy spectra and angular distributions of the nu mu-events have been computed for the simplest nu(s) - mass, and nu(s) - nu(mu) mixing schemes and confronted with the IceCube data. An illustrative statistical analysis of the present data shows that in the nu(s) - mass mixing case the sterile neutrinos with parameters required by LSND/MiniBooNE can be excluded at about 3 sigma level. The nu(s) - nu mu mixing scheme, however, can not be ruled out with currently available IceCube data.