The Neutrino Mass Hierarchy from Nuclear Reactor Experiments

Abstract

10 years from now reactor neutrino experiments will attempt to determine which neutrino mass eigenstate is the most massive. In this letter we present the results of more than seven million detailed simulations of such experiments, studying the dependence of the probability of successfully determining the mass hierarchy upon the analysis method, the neutrino mass matrix parameters, reactor flux models, geoneutrinos and, in particular, combinations of baselines. We show that a recently reported spurious dependence of the data analysis upon the high energy tail of the reactor spectrum can be removed by using a weighted Fourier transform. We determine the optimal baselines and corresponding detector locations. For most values of the CP-violating, leptonic Dirac phase delta, a degeneracy prevents NOvA and T2K from determining either delta or the hierarchy. We determine the confidence with which a reactor experiment can determine the hierarchy, breaking the degeneracy.

12 pages, v3: +backgrounds, energy response and other challenges

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• Simultaneous Precision Spectroscopy of $pp$, ${}^7$Be, and $pep$ Solar Neutrinos with Borexino Phase-II
• Neutrino mass hierarchy and electron neutrino oscillation parameters with one hundred thousand reactor events
• Shedding light on LMA-Dark solar neutrino solution by medium baseline reactor experiments: JUNO and RENO-50
• Beta-decay studies for applied and basic nuclear physics
• Terrestrial matter effects on reactor antineutrino oscillations at JUNO or RENO-50: how small is small?
• Sensitivity of medium-baseline reactor neutrino mass-hierarchy experiments to nonstandard interactions
• On the Bayesian approach to neutrino mass ordering
• Effect of Non Unitarity on Neutrino Mass Hierarchy determination at DUNE, NO$\nu$A and T2K
• Advantages of Multiple Detectors for the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy Determination at Reactor Experiments
• Mass hierarchy sensitivity of medium baseline reactor neutrino experiments with multiple detectors
• A new way to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy at reactors