Type: Article
Publication Date: 2010-12-01
Citations: 76
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.82.113002
The MINOS experiment at Fermilab has recently reported a tension between the oscillation results for neutrinos and antineutrinos. We show that this tension, if it persists, can be understood in the framework of nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI). While neutral current NSI (nonstandard matter effects) are disfavored by atmospheric neutrinos, a new charged current coupling between tau neutrinos and nucleons can fit the MINOS data without violating other constraints. In particular, we show that loop-level contributions to flavor-violating $\ensuremath{\tau}$ decays are sufficiently suppressed. However, conflicts with existing bounds could arise once the effective theory considered here is embedded into a complete renormalizable model. We predict the future sensitivity of the T2K and NO\ensuremath{\nu}A experiments to the NSI parameter region favored by the MINOS fit, and show that both experiments are excellent tools to test the NSI interpretation of the MINOS data.