Non-standard interactions versus non-unitary lepton flavor mixing at a neutrino factory

Understand

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.