Moving a Detector to Probe New Neutrino Interactions: IWCD at Hyper-Kamiokande

Abstract

Moving a detector through a beam with a spatially varying energy spectrum exposes the same target and apparatus to distinct incident spectra, enabling interaction spectroscopy. While movable neutrino detectors were put forth primarily to control systematic uncertainties, we show that detector motion enables probing the structure of fundamental interactions. We demonstrate this with the Intermediate Water Cherenkov Detector (IWCD), the movable detector of Hyper-Kamiokande in the J-PARC off-axis beam, considering neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) as a benchmark. Exploiting ratios of neutral current to charged current event rates reduces common normalization uncertainties, while measurements at multiple off-axis positions can break degeneracies that persist for a single incident spectrum. Combining three off-axis positions and adopting a $5\%$ correlated normalization uncertainty benchmark, we project $95\%$ CL sensitivities to axial neutral current NSI of $-0.07 \lesssim \varepsilon^{uA}_{\mu\mu} \lesssim 0.06$ and vector NSI of $-0.10 \lesssim \varepsilon^{uV}_{\mu\mu} \lesssim 0.12$, as well as for charged current NSI of $-0.05 \lesssim \varepsilon^{udL}_{\mu\mu} \lesssim 0.05$. Axial NSI, which do not contribute to the ordinary matter potential, are complementary to neutrino oscillation and high energy scattering measurements. More broadly, detector motion provides a new way to distinguish interactions with different energy dependence.