Non-standard antineutrino interactions at Daya Bay

Abstract

We study the prospects of pinning down the effects of non-standard antineutrino interactions in the source and in the detector at the Daya Bay neutrino facility. It is well known that if the non-standard interactions in the detection process are of the same type as those in the production, their net effect can be subsumed into a mere shift in the measured value of the leptonic mixing angle θ 13 . Relaxing this assumption, the ratio of the antineutrino spectra measured by the Daya Bay far and near detectors is distorted in a characteristic way, and good fits based on the standard oscillation hypothesis are no longer viable. We show that, under certain conditions, three years of Daya Bay running can be sufficient to provide a clear hint of non-standard neutrino physics.

Effects of nonstandard neutrino interactions at PINGU

“…For example, NSI effects have previously been studied for the accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiments MINOS and OPERA [3,4], atmospheric neutrino experiments [5][6][7], reactor neutrino experiments [8][9][10], and a future neutrino factory [11][12][13][14][15]. In this work, we investigate neutrino flavor transition probabilities based on standard neutrino oscillations and NSIs as sub-leading effects.…”

RareZdecays and neutrino flavor universality

“…While earlier studies [32][33][34] demanded that reactor experiments bound the NSI parameters ǫ eµ and ǫ eτ , recent analysis [35,36] showed that Daya Bay experiment cannot constrain the flavor-changing NSI parameters because of their strong correlation with the reactor angle θ 13 . It can, however, bound |ǫ ee | < O(10 −2 ), when the parameter is considered to be real, and a normalization error in the neutrino flux is taken into account.…”

A brief status of non-standard neutrino interactions

“…To my knowledge, there exist only three studies with reactor neutrinos and NSIs. (i) A combined study of the performance of reactor and superbeam neutrino experiments in the presence of NSIs [37], (ii) a study of only reactor neutrino experiments and NSIs [38], and (iii) NSIs at the Daya Bay experiment [39]. In the second study, it turns out that the measured value for θ 13 could be a combination of the fundamental value for θ 13 and effects of NSI parameters, whereas in the third study, one can estimate the effects of the NSIs in the determination of the standard oscillation parameters θ 13 and ∆m 100 GeV neutrino factory could probe flavor-changing neutrino interactions of the order of |ε| 10 −4 at 99 % C.L.…”