The effect of non-standard interactions and environmental decoherence at DUNE

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how non-standard interactions and environmental decoherence influence neutrino oscillation measurements at DUNE, assessing their impact on mass hierarchy and CP violation sensitivities and exploring the experiment's ability to differentiate these effects.

Contribution

It provides a combined analysis of NSI and environmental decoherence effects on DUNE's neutrino oscillation measurements, which is a novel comprehensive approach.

Findings

NSI and decoherence significantly alter oscillation probabilities.

DUNE's sensitivity to mass hierarchy and CP violation is affected by these effects.

The study shows DUNE can distinguish between NSI and decoherence effects.

Abstract

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a proposed long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that will project an on-axis wide-band neutrino beam over a distance of 1300 km to determine the unknowns in the neutrino sector. Given the baseline of 1300 km and the intense beam facility, DUNE is a promising experiment to study the sub-leading effects such as environmental decoherence, matter induced non-standard interactions (NSIs), neutrino decay, etc. In this study, we investigate how NSI and environmental decoherence affect the neutrino oscillation probabilities simultaneously. Considering the modified probabilities we obtain the updated mass hierarchy (MH) and CP violation (CPV) sensitivities of DUNE. Furthermore, we demonstrate the sensitivity of DUNE to distinguish between the effects of NSI and environmental decoherence.