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Non-unitary neutrino mixing in the NO$ν$A near detector data

The $ν_μ\to ν_e$ oscillation probability over short baseline ($\lesssim 1$~km) would be negligible in case the mixing matrix for three active neutrinos is unitary. However, in case of non-unitary mixing of three neutrinos, this probability would be non-negligible due to the so-called "zero distance" effect. Hence, the near detector of the accelerator experiments such as NO$ν$A can provide strong constraints on the parameters of the non-unitary mixing with very large statistics. By analyzing the NO$ν$A near detector data we find that the non-unitary mixing does not improve fits to the $ν_e$ or $ν_μ$ events over the standard unitary mixing. This leads to constraints on the non-unitary parameters: $α_{00}>0.911$, $|α_{10}|<0.020$ and $α_{11}>0.952$ at 90\% C.L. A combined analysis with the near and far detector data does not change these constraints significantly.