The full physics potential of the next-generation Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is still being explored. In particular, there have been some recent studies on the possibility of improving DUNE's neutrino energy reconstruction. The main motivation is that a better determination of the neutrino energy in an event-by-event basis will translate into an improved measurement of the Dirac $CP$ phase and other neutrino oscillation parameters. To further motivate studies and improvements on the neutrino energy reconstruction, we evaluate the impact of energy resolution at DUNE on an illustrative new physics scenario, viz. non-standard interactions (NSI) of neutrinos with matter. We show that a better energy resolution in comparison to the ones given in the DUNE conceptual and technical design reports may significantly enhance the experimental sensitivity to NSI, particularly when degeneracies are present. While a better reconstruction of the first oscillation peak helps disentangling standard $CP$ effects from those coming from NSIs, we find that the second oscillation peak also plays a nontrivial role in improving DUNE's sensitivity.
We explore the effects of non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) and how they modify neutrino propagation in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). We find that NSI can significantly modify the data to be collected by the DUNE experiment as long as the new physics parameters are large enough. For example, If the DUNE data are consistent with the standard three-massive-neutrinos paradigm, order 0.1 (in units of the Fermi constant) NSI effects will be ruled out. On the other hand, if large NSI effects are present, DUNE will be able to not only rule out the standard paradigm but also …
Quantum mechanical interactions between neutrinos and matter along the path of propagation, the Wolfenstein matter effect, are of particular importance for the upcoming long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, specifically the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Here, we explore specifically what about the matter density profile can be measured by DUNE, considering both the shape and normalization of the profile between the neutrinos' origin and detection. Additionally, we explore the capability of a perturbative method for calculating neutrino oscillation probabilities and whe…
We investigate the potential for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to probe the existence and effects of a fourth neutrino mass-eigenstate. We study the mixing of the fourth mass-eigenstate with the three active neutrinos of the Standard Model, including the effects of new sources of CP-invariance violation, for a wide range of new mass-squared differences, from lower than 10^-5 eV^2 to higher than 1 eV^2. DUNE is sensitive to previously unexplored regions of the mixing angle - mass-squared difference parameter space. If there is a fourth neutrino, in some regions of the paramete…
One of the main goals of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is to look for new sources of CP-invariance violation. Another is to significantly test the three-massive-neutrinos paradigm. Here, we show that there are CP-invariant new physics scenarios which, as far as DUNE data are concerned, cannot be distinguished from the three-massive-neutrinos paradigm with very large CP-invariance violating effects. We discuss examples with non-standard neutrino interactions and with a fourth neutrino mass eigenstate. We briefly discuss how ambiguities can be resolved by combining DUNE data wi…
We introduce the mono-neutrino signal at neutrino detectors as a smoking gun of sub-GeV scale dark matter candidates that mainly interact with standard model neutrinos. In a mono-neutrino process, invisible particles, either dark matter themselves or the mediator particle, are radiated off a neutrino when it undergoes the charged-current weak interaction. The associated signals include a missing transverse momentum with respect to the incoming neutrino beam direction and the production of wrong-sign charged leptons. We demonstrate the potential leading role of the future DUNE experiment, using…
We examine the capabilities of the DUNE experiment as a probe of the neutrino mixing paradigm. Taking the current status of neutrino oscillations and the design specifications of DUNE, we determine the experiment's potential to probe the structure of neutrino mixing and CP violation. We focus on the poorly determined parameters $θ_{23}$ and $δ_{CP}$ and consider both two and seven years of run. We take various benchmarks as our true values, such as the current preferred values of $θ_{23}$ and $δ_{CP}$, as well as several theory-motivated choices. We determine quantitatively DUNE's potential to…
Secret interactions of neutrinos with light new gauge bosons, $Z^\prime$, can lead to a rich phenomenology in supernova explosion as well as in the early Universe. This interaction can also lead to new decay modes for charged mesons, $π^+ (K^+) \to e^+ νZ'$, and subsequently to $Z'\to ν\barν$. After demonstrating that such an interaction can be accommodated within viable electroweak symmetric models, we study how the near detector (ND) of DUNE can probe this scenario. We also discuss how the DUNE ND can make it possible to reconstruct the flavor structure of the $Z^\prime$ coupling to neutrino…
When neutrino masses arise from the exchange of neutral heavy leptons, as in most seesaw schemes, the effective lepton mixing matrix $N$ describing neutrino propagation is non-unitary, hence neutrinos are not exactly orthonormal. New CP violation phases appear in $N$ that could be confused with the standard phase $δ_{\text{CP}}$ characterizing the three neutrino paradigm. We study the potential of the long-baseline neutrino experiment DUNE in probing CP violation induced by the standard CP phase in the presence of non-unitarity. In order to accomplish this we develop our previous formalism, so…
Light sterile neutrinos can be probed in a number of ways, including electroweak decays, cosmology and neutrino oscillation experiments. At long-baseline experiments, the neutral-current data is directly sensitive to the presence of light sterile neutrinos: once the active neutrinos have oscillated into a sterile state, a depletion in the neutral-current data sample is expected since they do not interact with the $Z$ boson. This channel offers a direct avenue to probe the mixing between a sterile neutrino and the tau neutrino, which remains largely unconstrained by current data. In this work, …
Testing, in a non-trivial, model-independent way, the hypothesis that the three-massive-neutrinos paradigm properly describes nature is among the main goals of the current and the next generation of neutrino oscillation experiments. In the coming decade, the DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande experiments will be able to study the oscillation of both neutrinos and antineutrinos with unprecedented precision. We explore the ability of these experiments, and combinations of them, to determine whether the parameters that govern these oscillations are the same for neutrinos and antineutrinos, as prescribed b…
The proposed Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) utilizes a wide-band on-axis tunable muon-(anti)neutrino beam with a baseline of 1300 km to search for CP violation with high precision. Given the long baseline, DUNE is also sensitive to effects due to non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) which can interfere with the standard 3-flavor oscillation paradigm. In this Letter, we exploit the tunability of the DUNE neutrino beam over a wide-range of energies and utilize a new theoretical metric to devise an experimental strategy for separating oscillation effects due to NSI from the stand…
We propose to use the unique event topology and reconstruction capabilities of liquid argon time projection chambers to study sub-GeV atmospheric neutrinos. The detection of low energy recoiled protons in DUNE allows for a determination of the leptonic $CP$-violating phase independent from the accelerator neutrino measurement. Our findings indicate that this analysis can exclude several values of $δ_{CP}$ beyond the $3σ$ level. Moreover, the determination of the sub-GeV atmospheric neutrino flux will have important consequences in the detection of diffuse supernova neutrinos and in dark matter…
We study how nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI) may be probed by a combination of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, neutrino oscillation and collider data, from COHERENT, DUNE, T2HK and the high-luminosity (HL) LHC. We focus on NSI induced by a new flavored gauge boson $Z'$ in a generic anomaly-free ultraviolet-complete model. For $Z'$ masses above 10 GeV, the HL-LHC has the best sensitivity regardless of the flavor structure of the model. For masses between 0.01 GeV-10 GeV, current LHCb data and future COHERENT data have the best sensitivity unless the $Z'$ couplings to the f…
In the era of precision neutrino physics, we study the influence of matter NSI on the question of neutrino mass ordering and its resolution. At long baseline experiments, since matter effects play a crucial role in addressing this very important question, it is timely to investigate how sub-leading effects due to NSI may affect and drastically alter inferences pertaining to this question. We demonstrate that the sensitivity to mass ordering gets significantly impacted due to NSI effects for various long baseline experiments including the upcoming long baseline experiment, Deep Underground Neut…
In this paper we show that the DUNE experiment can measure the Earth's density profile by analyzing atmospheric neutrino oscillations. The crucial feature that enables such measurement is the detailed event reconstruction capability of liquid argon time projection chambers. This allows for studying the sub-GeV atmospheric neutrino component, which bears a rich oscillation phenomenology, strongly dependent on the matter potential sourced by the Earth. We provide a pedagogical discussion of the MSW and parametric resonances and their role in measuring the core and mantle densities. By performing…
In this work we analyze quantum decoherence in neutrino oscillations considering the Open Quantum System framework and oscillations through matter for three neutrino families. Taking DUNE as a case study we performed sensitivity analyses for two neutrino flux configurations finding limits for the decoherence parameters. We also offer a physical interpretation for a new peak which arises at the $ν_{e}$ appearance probability with decoherence. The best sensitivity regions found for the decoherence parameters are $Γ_{21}\le 1.2\times10^{-23}\,\text{GeV}$ and $Γ_{32}\le 7.7\times10^{-25}\,\text{Ge…
Oscillation studies play a central role in elucidating at least some aspects of the flavor problem. Here we examine the status of the predictions of a lepton quarticity flavor theory of neutrino oscillations against the existing global sample of oscillation data. By performing quantitative simulations we also determine the potential of the upcoming DUNE experiment in narrowing down the currently ill-measured oscillation parameters $θ_{23}$ and $δ_{\text{CP}}$. We present the expected improved sensitivity on these parameters for different assumptions.
We explore the capabilities of the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to measure $ν_τ$ charged-current interactions and the associated oscillation probability $P(ν_μ\to ν_τ)$ at its far detector, concentrating on how such results can be used to probe neutrino properties and interactions. DUNE has the potential to identify significantly more $ν_τ$ events than all existing experiments and can use this data sample to nontrivially test the three-massive-neutrinos paradigm by providing complementary measurements to those from the $ν_e$ appearance and $ν_μ$ disappearance channels. …
Quasi-Dirac neutrinos are obtained when the Lagrangian density of a neutrino mass model contains both Dirac and Majorana mass terms, and the Majorana terms are sufficiently small. This type of neutrinos introduces new mixing angles and mass splittings into the Hamiltonian, which will modify the standard neutrino oscillation probabilities. In this paper, we focus on the case where the new mass splittings are too small to be measured, but new angles and phases are present. We perform a sensitivity study for this scenario for the upcoming experiments DUNE and JUNO, finding that they will improve …
If the heaviest neutrino mass eigenstate is unstable, its decay modes could include lighter neutrino eigenstates. In this case part of the decay products could be visible, as they would interact at neutrino detectors via mixing. At neutrino oscillation experiments, a characteristic signature of such \emph{visible neutrino decay} would be an apparent excess of events at low energies. We focus on a simple phenomenological model in which the heaviest neutrino decays as $ν_3 \rightarrow ν_{1,2} + ϕ$, where $ϕ$ is a new light scalar. If neutrinos are Majorana particles the helicity-flipping decays …
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 non-standard m…
We study the feasibility of using neutrino-electron elastic scattering to measure the neutrino flux in the DUNE neutrino oscillation experiment. The neutrino-electron scattering cross section is precisely known, and the kinematics of the reaction allow determination of the incoming neutrino energy by precise measurement of the energy and angle of the recoiling electron. For several possible near detectors, we perform an analysis of their ability to measure neutrino flux in the presence of backgrounds and uncertainties. With realistic assumptions about detector masses, we find that a liquid arg…
We propose a novel analysis strategy, that leverages the unique capabilities of the DUNE experiment, to study tau neutrinos. We integrate collider physics ideas, such as jet clustering algorithms in combination with machine learning techniques, into neutrino measurements. Through the construction of a set of observables and kinematic cuts, we obtain a superior discrimination of the signal ($S$) over the background ($B$). In a single year, using the nominal neutrino beam mode, DUNE may achieve $S/\sqrt{B}$ of $3.3$ and $2.3$ for the hadronic and leptonic decay channels of the tau respectively. …
A variety of new physics scenarios allow for neutrinos to up-scatter into a heavy neutral lepton state. For a range of couplings and neutrino energies, the heavy neutrino may travel some distance before decaying to visible final states. When both the up-scattering and decay occur within the detector volume, these "double bang" events produce distinctive phenomenology with very low background. In this work, we first consider the current sensitivity at Super-Kamiokande via the atmospheric neutrino flux, and find current data may already provide new constraints. We then examine projected future s…
The DUNE near detector will collect an unprecedented large number of neutrino interactions, allowing the precise measurement of rare processes such as neutrino trident production, i.e. the generation of a lepton-antilepton pair through the scattering of a neutrino off a heavy nucleus. The event rate of this process is a powerful probe to a well-motivated parameter space of new physics beyond the Standard Model. In this paper, we perform a detailed sensitivity study of the DUNE near detector to neutrino tridents. We provide state-of-the-art predictions for the Standard Model cross sections and …
The planned DUNE experiment will have excellent sensitivity to the vector and axial couplings of the electron to the $Z$-boson via precision measurements of neutrino--electron scattering. We investigate the sensitivity of DUNE-PRISM, a movable near detector in the direction perpendicular to the beam line, and find that it will qualitatively impact our ability to constrain the weak couplings of the electron. We translate these neutrino--electron scattering measurements into a determination of the weak mixing angle at low scales and estimate that, with seven years of data taking, the DUNE near-d…
The Neutrino oscillations have provided an excellent opportunity to study new-physics beyond the Standard Model, popularly known as BSM. The unknown couplings involving neutrinos, termed non-standard interactions (NSI), may appear as `new-physics' in different neutrino experiments. The neutrino NSI offers significant effects on neutrino oscillations and CP-sensitivity, which may be probed in various neutrino experiments. The idea of neutrinos coupling with a scalar has evolved recently and looks promising. The effects of scalar NSI may appear as a perturbation to the neutrino mass matrix in th…
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a proposed next generation superbeam experiment at Fermilab. Its aims include measuring the unknown neutrino oscillation parameters -- the neutrino mass hierarchy, the octant of the mixing angle $θ_{23}$ and the CP violating phase $δ_{CP}$. The current and upcoming experiments T2K, NOvA and ICAL@INO will also be collecting data for the same measurements. In this paper, we explore the sensitivity reach of DUNE in combination with these other experiments. We evaluate the least exposure required by DUNE to determine the above three unknown parame…
In this paper we present the updated physics sensitivity of DUNE in presence of a light sterile neutrino with both far and near detectors. In the previous studies, the sensitivities were obtained using the configuration of DUNE as described in the conceptual design report (CDR). In this article, we consider the configuration of DUNE as given in the technical design report (TDR) and study the capability of this experiment to constrain the sterile mixing parameters as well as its capability to measure the standard oscillation parameters in 3+1 scenario. Our results show that in 3+1 scenario, the…
We study the possibility of extracting the neutrino mass ordering at the future Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment using atmospheric neutrinos, which will be available before the muon neutrino beam starts being perational. The large statistics of the atmospheric muon neutrino and antineutrino samples at the far detector, together with the baselines of thousands of kilometers that these atmospheric (anti)neutrinos travel, provide the ideal ingredients to extract the neutrino mass ordering via matter effects in the neutrino propagation through the Earth. Crucially, muon capture by Argon provid…
We analyse the sensitivity of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to a sterile neutrino, combining information from both the Near Detector (ND) and the Far Detector (FD). DUNE's sterile exclusion reach is affected by taking into account the information on the neutrino production point, in contrast to assuming a point-like neutrino source. Visible differences remain after taking into account energy bin-to-bin uncorrelated systematics.
In this work, we have assumed special structures for the charged and neutral mass matrices in the lepton sector, inspired by structures for the up and down quark mass matrices that result by assuming a certain number of symmetrical zeros in their entries named texture zeros. A prediction of the lepton mixing matrix results from the rotation matrices that diagonalize the mass matrices in the neutral and charged lepton sectors. The use of texture zeros reduces the number of spurious parameters to the minimal ones needed to explain observations i.e. charged lepton masses and neutrino oscillation …
DUNE is an international project, currently in its design phase, for neutrino physics and proton-decay searches. It will consist of two detectors exposed to a megawatt-scale muon neutrino beam that will be produced at Fermilab (Illinois, USA). One detector will record particle interactions near the source of the beam, while a second, much larger, detector comprising four 10-kilotonne liquid argon TPCs will be installed at a depth of 1.5 km at SURF (South Dakota, USA), about 1300 kilometres away of the neutrino source. Among the primary scientific goals of DUNE is the precision measurement of t…
We study future DUNE sensitivity to various electromagnetic couplings of neutrinos, including magnetic moments, milli-charges, and charge radii. The DUNE PRISM capabilities play a crucial role in constraining the electron flavored couplings. We find that DUNE will be able to place the strongest terrestrial constraint on the muon-neutrino magnetic moment by improving on LSND's bounds by roughly a factor of two, although Borexino's solar constraint will still be stronger. For the muon neutrino milli-charge DUNE can place the leading experimental bound, with two orders of magnitude improvement co…
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a leading experiment in neutrino physics which is presently under construction. DUNE aims to measure the yet unknown parameters in the three flavour oscillation scenario which includes discovery of leptonic CP violation, determination of the mass hierarchy and determination of the octant of $θ_{23}$. Additionally, the ancillary goals of DUNE include probing the sub-dominant effects induced by new physics. A widely studied new physics scenario is that of nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI) in propagation which impacts the oscillations of ne…
We investigate the effects of charged-current (CC) nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSIs) at the source and at the detector in the simulated data for the planned Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), while neglecting the neutral-current NSIs at the propagation due to the fact that several solutions have been proposed to resolve the degeneracies posed by neutral-current NSIs while no solution exists for the degeneracies due to the CC NSIs. We study the effects of CC NSIs on the simultaneous measurements of $θ_{23}$ and $δ_{CP}$ in DUNE. The analysis reveals that 3$σ$ C.L. measurement o…
We study the matter effect caused by nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI) in the next generation long-baseline neutrino experiments, DUNE, T2HK and T2HKK. If multiple NSI parameters are nonzero, the potential of these experiments to detect CP violation, determine the mass hierarchy and constrain NSI is severely impaired by degeneracies between the NSI parameters and by the generalized mass hierarchy degeneracy. In particular, a cancellation between leading order terms in the appearance channels when $ε_{eτ} = \cotθ_{23} ε_{eμ}$, strongly affects the sensitivities to these two NSI parameters…
Many Beyond-Standard Model physics signatures are enhanced in high-energy neutrino interactions. To explore these signatures, ultra-large Cherenkov detectors such as IceCube exploit event samples with charged current muon neutrino interactions > 1 TeV. Most of these interactions occur below the detector volume, and produce muons that enter the detector. However, the large spacing between detectors leads to inefficiency for measuring muons with energies below or near the critical energy of 400 GeV. In response, IceCube has built a densely instrumented region within the larger detector. This pro…
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a 40-kton fiducial mass underground liquid argon time projection chamber experiment, will be sensitive to the electron-neutrino-flavor component of the burst of neutrinos expected from the next Galactic core-collapse supernova. Such an observation will bring unique insight into the astrophysics of core collapse as well as into the properties of neutrinos. The recent progress on detection and reconstruction of supernova burst neutrinos in DUNE, including the contribution of the light detection systems are presented.
The Non-Standard Interactions (NSIs) are subdominant effects, often appearing in various extensions of SM, which may impact the neutrino oscillations through matter. It is important and interesting to explore the impact of NSIs in the ongoing and upcoming precise neutrino oscillations experiments. In this work, we have studied the imprints of a scalar-mediated NSI in three upcoming long-baseline (LBL) experiments (DUNE, T2HK, T2HKK). The effects of scalar NSI appears as a medium-dependent correction to the neutrino mass term. Its contribution scales linearly with matter density, making LBL exp…
One of the primary objectives of Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is to discover the leptonic CP violation and to identify it's source. In this context, we study the impact of non-standard neutrino interactions (NSIs) on observing the CP violation signal at DUNE. We explore the impact of various parameter degeneracies introduced by non-zero NSI and identify which of these can influence the CP violation sensitivity and CP precision of DUNE, by considering NSI both in data and in theory. In particular, we study how the CP sensitivity of DUNE is affected because of the intrinsic hierar…
CPT symmetry, the combination of Charge Conjugation, Parity and Time reversal, is a cornerstone of our model building strategy and therefore the repercussions of its potential violation will severely threaten the most extended tool we currently use to describe physics, i.e. local relativistic quantum fields. However, limits on its conservation from the Kaon system look indeed imposing. In this work we will show that neutrino oscillation experiments can improve this limit by several orders of magnitude and therefore are an ideal tool to explore the foundations of our approach to Nature. Strictl…
Sharpening New Physics Searches in Neutrino Oscillations with DUNE-PRISM
Instituto de Física Corpuscular, Universidad de Valencia and CSIC（西班牙瓦伦西亚大学与CSIC联合的粒子物理研究所）；IJCLab, Pôle Théorie (Bat. 210), CNRS/IN2P3（法国国家科学研究中心/法国国家核与亚原子物理研究所理论与计算实验室）
We consider the sensitivity of the DUNE experiment to a heavy neutral lepton, HNL (also known as sterile neutrino) in the mass range from a few MeV to a few GeV, interacting with the Standard Model via a transition magnetic moment to the active neutrinos, the so-called dipole portal. The HNL is produced via the upscattering of active neutrinos, and the subsequent decay inside the detector provides a single-photon signal. We show that the tau-neutrino dipole portal can be efficiently probed at the DUNE far detector, using the tau-neutrino flux generated by neutrino oscillations, while the near …
Novel leptophilic neutral currents can be tested at upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments using two complementary processes, neutrino trident production and neutrino-electron ($ν-e$) elastic scattering. Considering generic anomaly-free $U(1)$ extensions of the Standard Model, we discuss the characteristics of $ν-e$ scattering as well as $e^+e^-$ and $μ^+μ^-$ trident production at the DUNE near detector in the presence of such BSM scenarios. We then determine the sensitivity of DUNE in constraining the well-known $L_e - L_μ$ and $L_μ- L_τ$ models. We conclude that DUNE will be able to probe…
