Enhancing sensitivity to non-standard neutrino interactions at INO combining muon and hadron information

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the impact of flavor violating neutral current non-standard interaction (NSI) parameter varepsilon _{mu tau } in the oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos separately using the 50 kt magnetized ICAL detector at INO. We find that due to non-zero varepsilon _{mu tau }, nu _mu rightarrow nu _mu and {bar{nu }}_mu rightarrow {bar{nu }}_mu transition probabilities get modified substantially at higher energies and longer baselines, where vacuum oscillation dominates. We demonstrate for the first time that by adding the hadron energy information along with the muon energy and muon direction in each event, the sensitivity of ICAL to the NSI parameter varepsilon _{mu tau } can be enhanced significantly. The most optimistic bound on varepsilon _{mu tau } that we obtain is -,,0.01< varepsilon _{mu tau } < 0.01 at 90% C.L. using 500 ktcdot yr exposure and considering E_mu , cos theta _mu , and E'_{mathrm{had}} as observables in their ranges of [1, 21] GeV, [− 1, 1], and [0, 25] GeV, respectively. We discuss for the first time the importance of the charge identification capability of the ICAL detector to have better constraints on varepsilon _{mu tau }. We also study the impact of non-zero varepsilon _{mu tau } on mass hierarchy determination and precision measurement of oscillation parameters.