Test of flavor-changing neutral currents from elastic neutrino- and antineutrino-proton scattering

Abstract

The general form of the neutral currents satisfying "natural" conservation of strangeness is considered for the general class of SU(2) \ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{} U(1) gauge models and is tested against the existing data on elastic $\ensuremath{\nu}p$ and $\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}p$ scattering. The existence of charm-changing neutral currents seems to be a possibility. In addition, we predict the ratio of the charged-current $\ensuremath{\nu}$ and $\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}$ cross sections ${R}_{\mathrm{CC}}=\frac{{\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}}{{\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}}$ to be less than about 0.8 at high energies.