Degeneracy between θ23 octant and neutrino non-standard interactions at DUNE

Abstract

We expound in detail the degeneracy between the octant of θ23 and flavor-changing neutral-current non-standard interactions (NSI's) in neutrino propagation, considering the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) as a case study. In the presence of such NSI parameters involving the e−μ (εeμ) and e−τ (εeτ) flavors, the νμ→νe and ν¯μ→ν¯e appearance probabilities in long-baseline experiments acquire an additional interference term, which depends on one new dynamical CP-phase ϕeμ/eτ. This term sums up with the well-known interference term related to the standard CP-phase δ creating a source of confusion in the determination of the octant of θ23. We show that for values of the NSI coupling (taken one at-a-time) as small as few% (relative to the Fermi coupling constant GF), and for unfavorable combinations of the two CP-phases δ and ϕeμ/eτ, the discovery potential of the octant of θ23 gets completely lost.