Constraints on the non-standard interaction in propagation from atmospheric neutrinos

Abstract

The sensitivity of the atmospheric neutrino experiments to the non-standard flavor-dependent interaction in neutrino propagation is studied under the assumption that the only nonvanishing components of the non-standard matter effect are the electron and tau neutrino components ${ϵ}_{ee}$, ${ϵ}_{e\tau }$, ${ϵ}_{\tau \tau }$ and that the tau-tau component satisfies the constraint ${ϵ}_{\tau \tau }=|{ϵ}_{e\tau }{|}^2/(1+{ϵ}_{ee})$ which is suggested from the high energy behavior for atmospheric neutrino data. It is shown that the Superkamiokande (SK) data for 4438 days constrains $|\tan \beta |\equiv |{ϵ}_{e\tau }/(1+{ϵ}_{ee})|\lesssim 0.8$ at 2.5$\sigma$ (98.8\%) CL whereas the future Hyperkamiokande experiment for the same period of time as SK will constrain as $|\tan \beta |\lesssim 0.3$ at 2.5$\sigma$CL from the energy rate analysis and the energy spectrum analysis will give even tighter bounds on ${ϵ}_{ee}$ and $|{ϵ}_{e\tau }|$.

Comments: 17 pages, 14 figures, uses jheppub.sty