Effects of non-standard interactions in the MINOS experiment

We investigate the effects of non-standard interactions on the determination of the neutrino oscillation parameters Δm312, θ23θ23, and θ13θ13 in the MINOS experiment. We show that adding non-standard interactions to the analysis lead to an extension of the allowed parameter space to larger values of Δm312 and smaller θ23θ23, and basically removes all predictability for θ13θ13. In addition, we discuss the sensitivities to the non-standard interaction parameters of the MINOS experiment alone. In particular, we examine the degeneracy between θ13θ13 and the non-standard interaction parameter εeτεeτ. We find that this degeneracy is responsible for the removal of the θ13θ13 predictability and that the possible bound on |εeτ||εeτ| is competitive with direct bounds only if a more stringent external bound on θ13θ13 is applied.