Impact of non-standard interactions on neutrino-nucleon scattering

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-standard neutrino-nucleon interactions, including exotic reactions and lepton-flavour violation, can significantly alter scattering cross sections and event rates, impacting neutrino experiment interpretations.

Contribution

It formulates a formalism for non-standard interactions in neutrino-nucleon scattering and explores their effects on cross sections and event rates in existing neutrino experiments.

Findings

Exotic nucleon form factors can significantly affect cross sections.

Event rates are sensitive to lepton-flavour violating parameters.

Neutrino experiments like LSND and MiniBooNE can probe NSI effects.

Abstract

Non-standard neutrino-nucleon interaction is formulated and explored within the energy range of quasi-elastic scattering. In particular, the study focuses on the neutral-current elastic (anti)neutrino scattering off nucleons described by the exotic reactions $\nu_\alpha ({\bar \nu}_\alpha) + n \rightarrow \nu_\beta ({\bar \nu}_\beta) + n $ and $ \nu_\alpha ({\bar \nu}_\alpha) + p \rightarrow \nu_\beta ({\bar \nu}_\beta) + p$, which provide corrections to the dominant Standard Model processes. In this context, it is shown that the required exotic nucleon form factors may have a significant impact on the relevant cross sections. Besides cross sections, the event rate is expected to be rather sensitive to the magnitude of the lepton-flavour violating parameters resulting in an excess of events. The overlap of non-standard interactions and strange quark contributions, in the region of few GeV neutrino energies, is also examined. The formalism is applied for the case of the relevant neutrino-nucleon scattering experiments (LSND, MiniBooNE, etc.) and motivates the notion that such facilities have high potential to probe NSI.