Global analysis of neutrino oscillation data in four-neutrino schemes

Abstract We present an analysis of the global neutrino oscillation data in terms of four-neutrino mass schemes. We find that the strong preference of oscillations into active neutrinos implied by the latest solar as well as atmospheric neutrino data allows to rule out (2+2) mass schemes, whereas (3+1) schemes are strongly disfavoured by short-baseline experiments. Our analysis shows that four-neutrino oscillations do not provide a satisfactory description of the global neutrino oscillation data including the LSND result.