Effects of non-standard interactions in the MINOS experiment

Abstract

We investigate the effects of non-standard interactions on the determination of the neutrino oscillation parameters $\Delta m_{31}^2$, ${\theta }_{23}$, and ${\theta }_{13}$ in the MINOS experiment. We show that adding non-standard interactions to the analysis leads to an extension of the allowed parameter space to larger values of $\Delta m_{31}^2$ and smaller ${\theta }_{23}$, and basically removes all predictability for ${\theta }_{13}$. In addition, we discuss the sensitivities to the non-standard interaction parameters of the MINOS experiment alone. In particular, we examine the degeneracy between ${\theta }_{13}$ and the non-standard interaction parameter ${\text{eps}}_{e\tau }$. We find that this degeneracy is responsible for the removal of the ${\theta }_{13}$ predictability and that the possible bound on $|{\text{eps}}_{e\tau }|$ is competitive with direct bounds only if a more stringent external bound on ${\theta }_{13}$ is applied.

Comments: 15 pages, 4 figures, RevTeX4, clarifications made and typos corrected, final version, published in Phys. Lett. B