Nonstandard interactions of neutrinos with dense matter

Abstract

Nonstandard interaction is expected to be a crucial hint in explaining the experimental data on neutrino scattering off electrons. In this context, the nonstandard interaction vector and axial-vector couplings are needed to be extracted from recent experiments and a few of them are now available in the literature. With these coupling bounds, in this paper, I explore their impacts on the neutrinos interacting with the free electron gas in dense matter. To this end, I compute and predict the neutrino differential cross section and mean free path in dense matter for those existing experimental bounds. Interesting behavior in the neutrino cross sections and mean free path is found for the different nonstandard interaction couplings from different experiment constraints. I also found that the neutrino cross-section and mean free path in the dense matter are very sensitive to values and signs of the nonstandard interaction couplings, leading to different prediction results to the Standard Model cross-section and mean free path as well as their totals, which is given by a sum of the Standard Model and nonstandard interaction.