Probing generalized neutrino interactions with the DUNE Near Detector

Abstract

We explore the prospects of constraining general non standard interactions involving light mediators through elastic neutrino-electron scattering events at the DUNE Near Detector (ND). We furthermore consider the special cases of light vector mediators in motivated models such as U(1)B−L, $$ \textrm{U}{(1)}_{L_{\mu }-{L}_{\tau }} $$ U 1 L μ − L τ , E6 and left-right symmetry. The present analysis is based on detailed Monte Carlo simulations of the expected DUNE-ND signal taking into account detector resolution effects, realistic backgrounds as well as On-Axis and Off-Axis neutrino spectra. We show that the high intensity neutrino beam available at Fermilab can place competitive constraints surpassing those of low-energy neutrino searches and direct detection dark matter experiments.

Light vector mediators at direct detection experiments

“…Reference [65] set constraints on general neutrino interactions using SENSEI, Edelweiss, and SuperCDMS data and as well as projections for future experiments. These studies complement bounds inferred using CEνNS data by COHERENT [66] and EνES data at Borexino [67], as well as forecasts for the DUNE near detector [68] and FASER [69]. Additional studies have focused on anomaly-free U(1) ′ models.…”

“…In this section we present the bounds obtained for all models discussed in section 2. In all cases we compare our bounds with previous ones obtained in the literature, in particular with the ones included in the DarkCast package [85], the ones obtained from COHERENT data [54,68] and from neutrino oscillation experiments [46]. DarkCast implements constraints from several classes of experiments: 3 beam dump (E141 [86], E137 [87], E774 [88], KEK [89], Orsay [90][91][92], ν-CAL I [93][94][95][96], CHARM [97,98], NOMAD [99], and PS191 [100,101]), fixed target (A1 [102] and APEX [103]), colliders (BaBar [104], KLOE [105,106], LHCb [107]), rare-meson decay (NA48/2 [108]) experiments, neutrino scattering experiments (TEXONO, CHARM-II and BOREXINO [109][110][111][112][113]), and searches for dark photons in NA64 [114][115][116][117] and BaBar [118].…”

“…As can be seen in figure 1, current DM DD experiments produce slightly weaker (stronger) bounds for large (small) masses than other experiments measuring EνES [109][110][111][112][113], like TEXONO, CHARM-II and BOREXINO ("ν scattering", depicted as coral-shaded areas). On the other hand, DM DD bounds do improve upon CEνNS constraints 5 from the COHERENT experiment [68] (green area), by about two orders of magnitude at m Z ′ ≲ 0.01 MeV. Among beam-dump experiments, usually covering masses m Z ′ ≳ 1 MeV, let us highlight NA64 [115], whose bound applies to lighter mediators as well and is comparable to the limits set by ν-scattering experiments.…”

“…The COHERENT result, available for the case of L µ − L τ only, is taken from ref. [68]. 7 Let us also mention that bounds for very small mediator masses have been calculated in ref.…”

Probing Light New Mediators on Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering

“…We also show the limits obtained for the CEνNS process from dark-matter experiments such as LZ [51] and XENONnT [99] as well as projected dark matter [22]. Furthermore, we include constraints obtained for the neutrino-electron scattering process from DUNE and BOREXINO [100] experiments. We also show the limit from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) [101] in the low mass regime and the 2σ allowed region of the muon anomalous magnetic moment (g − 2) µ [102].…”