Super-NOνA: A long-baseline neutrino experiment with two off-axis detectors

Abstract

Establishing the neutrino mass hierarchy is one of the fundamental questions that will have to be addressed in the near future. Its determination could be obtained with long-baseline experiments but typically suffers from degeneracies with other neutrino parameters. We consider here the $\mathrm{NO}\ensuremath{\nu}\mathrm{A}$ experiment configuration and propose to place a second off-axis detector, with a shorter baseline, such that, by exploiting matter effects, the type of neutrino mass hierarchy could be determined with only the neutrino run. We show that the determination of this parameter is free of degeneracies, provided the ratio $L/E$, where $L$ is the baseline and $E$ is the neutrino energy, is the same for both detectors.