Searching for non-unitary neutrino oscillations in the present T2K and NOνA data

The mixing of three active neutrino flavors is parameterized by the unitary PMNS matrix. If there are more than three neutrino flavors and if the extra generations are heavy iso-singlets, the effective 3 × 3 mixing matrix for the three active neutrinos will be non-unitary. We have analyzed the lates...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields Particles and fields, 2021-05, Vol.81 (5), Article 444
Main Authors: Miranda, Luis Salvador, Pasquini, Pedro, Rahaman, Ushak, Razzaque, Soebur
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Astrophysics and Cosmology
Elementary Particles
Experiments
Flavors
Hadrons
Heavy Ions
Measurement Science and Instrumentation
Neutrinos
Nuclear Energy
Nuclear Physics
Particle physics
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Field Theories
Quantum Field Theory
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
String Theory
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Summary:The mixing of three active neutrino flavors is parameterized by the unitary PMNS matrix. If there are more than three neutrino flavors and if the extra generations are heavy iso-singlets, the effective 3 × 3 mixing matrix for the three active neutrinos will be non-unitary. We have analyzed the latest T2K and NO ν A data with the hypothesis of non-unitary mixing of the active neutrinos. We found that the 2019 NO ν A data slightly (at ∼ 1 σ CL) prefer the non-unitary mixing over unitary mixing. In fact, allowing the non-unitary mixing brings the NO ν A best-fit point in the sin 2 θ 23 - δ CP plane closer to the T2K best-fit point. The 2019 T2K data, on the other hand, cannot rule out any of the two mixing schemes. A combined analysis of the NO ν A and T2K 2019 data prefers the non-unitary mixing at 1 σ CL. We derive constraints on the non-unitary mixing parameters using the best-fit to the combined NO ν A and T2K data. These constraints are weaker than previously found. The latest 2020 data from both the experiments prefer non-unitarity over unitary mixing at 1 σ CL. The combined analysis prefers non-unitarity at 2 σ CL. The stronger tension, which exists between the latest 2020 data of the two experiments, also gets reduced with non-unitary analysis.
ISSN:1434-6044
1434-6052
DOI:10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09227-0