General neutrino interactions at the DUNE near detector

We consider the effect of general neutrino interactions (scalar, vector, pseudoscalar, axial vector, and tensor) in neutrino-electron scattering at the DUNE near detector. Those interactions can be associated with heavy new physics and their effect is to cause distortions in the recoil spectrum of the electrons. We show that for some cases energy scales up to 9 TeV are accessible after a 5 year run and that current bounds on interaction parameters can be improved by up to an order of magnitude. The full set of general interactions includes the usually considered neutrino-electron nonstandard matter interactions, and the near detector will give limits comparable but complementary to the ones from the analysis of neutrino oscillations in the far detector.

Figure 1

Simulated neutrino fluxes from the optimized design in [15] for both neutrino and antineutrino beam.

Figure 2

Expected electron event numbers from neutrino-electron scattering in neutrino channel (blue) and antineutrino channel (red) at each 2.5 years of exposure assuming SM parameters.

Figure 3

Deviation of the expected event number spectrum in the neutrino channel for different new physics parameters tuned away from their SM values. The sample values are of the order of magnitude of current bounds, see Table 3.

Figure 4

Two-parameter exclusion plots after $2.5+2.5\mathrm{years}$ of DUNE operation. Contours correspond to 90% and 95% C.L. respectively. The red, blue, and green regions correspond to, respectively, experimental configurations A, B, and C [specified in (19)]. We only show flavor-diagonal components of ${\epsilon }^{L,\mathrm{NSI}}$ and ${\epsilon }^{R,\mathrm{NSI}}$; single-parameter bounds on the off-diagonal parameters are given in Table 3.