Non-standard antineutrino interactions at Daya Bay

TL;DR

This paper explores how non-standard antineutrino interactions could affect measurements at Daya Bay, potentially revealing new physics beyond standard neutrino oscillations within three years of data collection.

Contribution

It demonstrates that deviations in antineutrino spectra ratios at Daya Bay can indicate non-standard interactions, providing a method to detect new neutrino physics.

Findings

Non-standard interactions can distort the antineutrino spectrum ratio.

Standard oscillation fits become invalid under certain non-standard interaction scenarios.

Three years of Daya Bay data may reveal signs of non-standard neutrino physics.

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 theta_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.