Statistical significance of CP violation in long baseline neutrino experiments

Abstract

The p-value or statistical significance of a CP conservation null hypothesis test is determined from counting electron neutrino and antineutrino appearance oscillation events. The statistical estimates include cases with background events and different data sample sizes, graphical plots to interpret results and methods to combine p-values from different experiments. These estimates are useful for optimizing the search for CP violation with different amounts of neutrino and antineutrino beam running, comparing results from different experiments and for simple cross checks of more elaborate statistical estimates that use likelihood fitting of neutrino parameters.