We study the discovery reach for nonstandard interactions (NSIs) in a neutrino factory experiment. After giving a theoretical, but model-independent, overview of the most relevant classes of NSIs, we present detailed numerical results for some of them. Our simulations take into account matter effects, uncertainties in the neutrino oscillation parameters, systematical errors, parameter correlations, and degeneracies. We perform scans of the parameter space, and show that a neutrino factory has excellent prospects of detecting NSIs originating from new physics at around 1 TeV, which is a scale favored by many extensions of the standard model. It will also turn out that the discovery reach depends strongly on the standard and nonstandard $CP$ violating phases in the Lagrangian.

• Received 8 March 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.013001