Search for flavor-changing nonstandard neutrino interactions using ν e appearance in MINOS

Abstract

We report new constraints on flavor-changing nonstandard neutrino interactions from the MINOS long-baseline experiment using ν e and ¯ ν e appearance candidate events from predominantly ν μ and ¯ ν μ beams. We used a statistical selection algorithm to separate ν e candidates from background events, enabling an analysis of the combined MINOS neutrino and antineutrino data. We observe no deviations from standard neutrino mixing, and thus place constraints on the nonstandard interaction matter effect, | ϵ e τ | , and phase, ( δ C P + δ e τ ) , using a 30-bin likelihood fit.