Study of scalar nonstandard interaction at the Protvino to super-ORCA experiment

Abstract

In this paper we have studied the phenomenon of nonstandard interaction mediated by a scalar field (SNSI) in the context of P2SO experiment and compared its sensitivity with DUNE. In particular, we have studied the capability of these two experiments to put bounds on the diagonal SNSI parameters, i.e., ηee, ημμ, and ηττ and studied the impact of these parameters on the determination of neutrino mass ordering, octant of θ23 and CP violation (CPV). In our analysis we find that, the parameter Δm312 has a nontrivial role if one wants estimate the bounds on ημμ and ηττ assuming SNSI does not exist in nature. Our results show that sensitivity of P2SO and DUNE to constraint ημμ and ηττ are similar whereas the sensitivity of DUNE is slightly better for ηee. We find that the mass ordering and CPV sensitivities are mostly affected by ηee compared to ημμ and ηττ if one assumes SNSI exists in nature. On the other hand, octant sensitivity is mostly affected by ημμ and ηττ. These sensitivities can be either higher or lower than the standard three flavor scenario depending on the relative sign of the SNSI parameters. Regarding the precision of atmospheric mixing parameters, we find that the precision of θ23 deteriorates significantly in the presence of ημμ and ηττ. Published by the American Physical Society 2024