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  • Open Access

Ultralight dark matter in long-baseline accelerator neutrino oscillations

Xin-Qiang Li1,*, Hai-Xing Lin1,2,†, Jian Tang2,‡, and Sampsa Vihonen3,2,§

  • *Contact author: xqli@mail.ccnu.edu.cn
  • †Contact author: linhx55@mails.ccnu.edu.cn
  • ‡Contact author: tangjian5@mail.sysu.edu.cn
  • §Contact author: vihonen@kth.se
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 012009 – Published 8 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/twkz-l635

Abstract

We present a systematic study of the effects of ultralight dark matter (ULDM) on neutrino oscillations using the latest long-baseline data from the T2K and NOνA experiments. Our analysis covers both flavor-universal and flavor-general scalar interactions as well as vector interactions associated with the Le−Lμ and Lμ−Lτ gauge symmetries. Importantly, we explicitly consider the coherence properties of the ULDM by incorporating the resulting stochastic fluctuations into our statistical analysis. We find that in the low-mass regime, mϕ≲10−17  eV, where the stochastic effects are maximal, the constraints on the ULDM couplings are relaxed by roughly an order of magnitude compared to those in the high-mass regime, mϕ≳10−15  eV, where such fluctuations are effectively averaged out. While the combined T2K and NOνA datasets impose nontrivial exclusion limits on the ULDM interactions, we do not find statistically significant evidence that these effects can alleviate the current tension in determining the charge-parity (CP) violating phase δCP between the two experiments. Therefore, it will be essential for future high-precision facilities to further probe the ULDM scenarios and achieve a definitive measurement of δCP.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 012009– Published 8 July, 2026
  • Received 17 April 2026
  • Accepted 9 June 2026
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