Dark NSI & neutrino oscillations : probing via $\delta_{CP}$ measurements at DUNE and T2HK

TL;DR

This paper explores how interactions between neutrinos and scalar dark matter, termed dark NSI, can influence neutrino oscillation measurements, especially the CP-violating phase, at DUNE and T2HK, revealing potential enhancements or suppressions in sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of dark NSI affecting neutrino oscillations and analyzes their impact on CP violation measurements at upcoming long-baseline experiments.

Findings

Dark NSI can significantly alter CP-violation sensitivity.

Synergy between DUNE and T2HK can mitigate dark NSI effects.

Dark NSI phases can cause degeneracies in measurements.

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of neutrinos interacting with a scalar dark matter field and the resulting implications for neutrino oscillations in the long-baseline sector. As our Universe is predominantly composed of dark matter, neutrinos propagating over astrophysical and terrestrial baselines inevitably traverse a dark matter background. The coherent forward scattering of neutrinos in such a background induces a medium-dependent correction to the mass-squared term in the effective neutrino Hamiltonian having opposing signs for neutrinos and antineutrinos. We study how the elements of this correction matrix, arising from coherent forward scattering of neutrinos with scalar dark matter background referred to as dark non-standard interactions (dark NSI), modify neutrino oscillation probabilities. Furthermore, we also study the effect of the off-diagonal elements and the associated phases on the measurement of leptonic CP violating phase focusing on the upcoming long-baseline superbeam experiments DUNE and T2HK. We show that dark NSI can lead to substantial enhancement or suppression of CP-violation sensitivity, depending on the true values of the dark NSI phases $\phi_{\alpha \beta}$. We further explored how the synergy of DUNE and T2HK can effectively mitigate the degeneracies due to the dark NSI phases, and can restore or even enhance the CP sensitivity as compared to the standard oscillation scenario.