Abstract: Despite having already been awarded a Nobel Prize, the golden age of neutrino oscillation experiments is only just beginning. In addition to solving the remaining puzzles in the standard three-neutrino framework, neutrino experiments are also sensitive to new physics effects that could appear in the process of neutrino production, propagation and/or detection. In the first part of this talk, I will introduce a novel manifestation of physics beyond the Standard Model, testable already at present-day accelerator based experiments such as NOvA and T2K, which is based on the fact that neutrino mixing parameters at the scale of neutrino production and detection do not necessarily need to coincide. This will be shown in the context of a particular neutrino mass model within which large renormalization group effects occur. In the second part of the talk, I will address the anomalous findings of the MiniBooNE experiment, which have been touted as either a possible hint for new physics, or a reflection of our poor understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions. I will address this anomaly by critically examining a number of theoretical uncertainties affecting the event rate prediction at MiniBooNE, focusing on charged current quasielastic events, single-photon events, and those from neutral pion decay. This will allow me to discuss the dependence of the statistical significance of the anomaly on such uncertainties. I will also critically examine new physics explanations of MiniBooNE anomaly, focusing on eV-scale sterile neutrinos. In the last part of the talk, I will discuss the potential of DUNE, the leading US-based neutrino experiment for the next decade, for probing light dark sectors, and will take axion-like particles (ALPs) as an example. At DUNE, the high-intensity proton beam impinging on a target will not only produce neutrinos, but will also yield copious amounts of photons, allowing for photophilic ALPs to be produced with high intensity. I will show that a wide range of ALP parameter space, including regions unconstrained by existing bounds, will be explored at DUNE.
The College of Arts