2009/12/31 by Davide Meloni, Tommy Ohlsson, Walter Winter +1 · 50 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Fermion #Flavor #Hadron #Lepton #Mixing (physics) #Neutrino #Neutrino Factory #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino oscillation #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep04(2010)041
published in Journal of High Energy Physics 2010(4) (Springer Nature) · 32 pages, 5 figures. Final version published in JHEP. v3: Typo in Eq. (27) corrected
openalex publication_date 2010/04/01 · arxiv created 2012/07/12 · arxiv updated 2012/07/13 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The impact of heavy mediators on neutrino oscillations is typically described by non-standard four-fermion interactions (NSIs) or non-unitarity (NU). We focus on leptonic dimension-six effective operators which do not produce charged lepton flavor violation. These operators lead to particular correlations among neutrino production, propagation, and detection non-standard effects. We point out that these NSIs and NU phenomenologically lead, in fact, to very similar effects for a neutrino factory, for completely different fundamental reasons. We discuss how the parameters and probabilities are related in this case, and compare the sensitivities. We demonstrate that the NSIs and NU can, in principle, be distinguished for large enough effects at the example of non-standard effects in the μ-τ-sector, which basically corresponds to differentiating between scalars and fermions as heavy mediators as leading order effect. However, we find that a near detector at superbeams could provide very synergistic information, since the correlation between source and matter NSIs is broken for hadronic neutrino production, while NU is a fundamental effect present at any experiment.