EFT for Neutrino Oscillations: Theory Developments and Application to JUNO

Abstract

We contribute to the systematic analysis of New Physics effects in neutrino experiments using Effective Field Theory (EFT) methods. We review and extend the quantum field-theoretical formalism for generic neutrino interactions, discussing the inclusion of matter effects and deriving the connection with the density matrix formalism. On the phenomenological side, we apply this framework for the first time to medium-baseline reactor neutrino experiments. We derive analytical expressions for the relevant oscillation observables and perform a first EFT analysis of the recent JUNO dataset, extracting bounds on the leading non-standard interaction parameters.