Probing Flavor Changing Neutrino Interactions Using Neutrino Beams from a Muon Storage Ring

Abstract

We discuss the capabilities of a future neutrino factory based on intense neutrino beams from a muon storage ring to explore the non-standard neutrino matter interactions, which are assumed to be sub-leading effects in the standard mass induced neutrino oscillations. The conjunction of these two mechanisms will magnify fake CP violating effect in the presence of matter which is not coming from the CP phase in the neutrino mixing matrix. We show that such fake CP violation can be observed in neutrino factory experiments by measuring the difference between the neutrino and anti-neutrino probabilities. In order to perform such test, we consider three neutrino flavors, admitting the mixing parameters in the range consistent with the oscillation solution to the atmospheric and the solar neutrino problems, as well as with the constraints imposed by the reactor neutrino data. We show that with a 10 kt detector with 5 years of operation, a stored muon energy E_μ\ge 20 GeV, 2 \times 10^{20} muon decays per year, and a baseline L \sim 732 km, such a neutrino facility can probe the non-standard flavor changing neutrino interactions down to the level of (10^{-3}-10^{-2})~G_F, in both ν_μ\to ν_τ/ \bar ν_μ\to \bar ν_τand ν_e \to ν_τ/\bar ν_e \to \bar ν_τmodes.