Abstract
This article reports the optimized experimental requirements to determine neutrino mass hierarchy using electron antineutrinos (ν¯e) generated in a nuclear reactor. The features of the neutrino mass hierarchy can be extracted from the |Δm312| and |Δm322| oscillations by applying the Fourier sine and cosine transforms to the L/E spectrum. To determine the neutrino mass hierarchy above 90% probability, the requirements on the energy resolution as a function of the baseline are studied at sin22θ13=0.1. If the energy resolution of the neutrino detector is less than 0.04/Eν and the determination probability obtained from Bayes' theorem is above 90%, the detector needs to be located around 48–53 km from the reactor(s) to measure the energy spectrum of ν¯e. These results will be helpful for setting up an experiment to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, which is an important problem in neutrino physics.
Highlights
Since the measurement of the large sin2 2θ13 at RENO, Daya Bay, and Double Chooz, the precise measurement of neutrino mass hierarchy, the sign of ∆m232, has become the focus in neutrino physics[1,2,3]
We introduce parameters P VF ST and P VF CT to quantify the features of Fourier sine transform (FST) and Fourier cosine transform (FCT)
We have studied the experimental requirements to determine neutrino mass hierarchy using Fourier sine and cosine transform of the reactor neutrino L/E spectrum at sin2 2θ13 = 0.1
Summary
Since the measurement of the large sin2 2θ13 at RENO, Daya Bay, and Double Chooz, the precise measurement of neutrino mass hierarchy, the sign of ∆m232, has become the focus in neutrino physics[1,2,3]. For an intermediate-baseline neutrino experiment, many approaches have been proposed; they can be categorized into the χ2 analysis methods, which are discussed in Refs.[4,5,6,7,8], and the Fourier-transform methods[5, 9, 10]. The intermediate baseline based on reactor neutrino experiments has been explored using the precise measurement of distortions of the energy spectrum with negligible matter effect. Learned et al proposed a new method to distinguish normal and inverse hierarchy after a Fourier transform of the L/E spectrum of reactor neutrinos[12] They pointed out that the Fourier power spectrum has a small but not negligible shoulder next to the main peak, and its relative position could be used to extract the mass hierarchy while a non-zero θ13 is considered. The optimal baseline length is estimated based on the expected probability of determination
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