Standard and non-standard physics in neutrino oscillations

Abstract

We analyze the impact of recent solar and atmospheric data in the determination of the neutrino oscillation parameters, taking into account that both the solar η e and the atmospheric η μ may convert to a mixture of active and sterile neutrinos. Furthermore, in the context of the atmospheric neutrino problem we discuss an extended mechanism of neutrino propagation which combines both oscillations and non-standard neutrino-matter interactions. We use the most recent neutrino data, including the 1496-day Super-K solar and atmospheric data samples, the latest SNO spectral and day/night solar data, and the final MACRO atmospheric results. We confirm the clear preference of all the data for pure-active oscillation solutions, bounding the fraction of sterile neutrino involved in oscillations to be less than 52% in the solar sector and less than 40% in the atmospheric sector, at 3σ. For the atmospheric case we also derive a bound on the total amount of non-standard neutrino-matter interactions, bounding the flavor-changing component to −0.03 ≤ ϵ ≤ 0.02 and the non-universal component to |ϵ′| ≤ 0.05.