Non-standard antineutrino interactions at Daya Bay

Understand

We study the prospects of pinning down the effects of non-standard antineutrino interactions in the source and in the detector at the Daya Bay neutrino facility.

• It is well known that if the non-standard interactions in the detection process are of the same type as those in the production, their net effect can be subsumed into a mere shift in the measured value of the leptonic mixing angle theta_13.
• Relaxing this assumption, the ratio of the antineutrino spectra measured by the Daya Bay far and near detectors is distorted in a characteristic way, and good fits based on the standard oscillation hypothesis are no longer viable.
• We show that, under certain conditions, three years of Daya Bay running can be sufficient to provide a clear hint of non-standard neutrino physics.