Mass hierarchy sensitivity of medium baseline reactor neutrino experiments with multiple detectors

Abstract

We report the neutrino mass hierarchy (MH) sensitivity of medium baseline reactor neutrino experiments with multiple detectors. Sensitivity of determining the MH can be significantly improved by adding a near detector and combining both the near and far detectors. The size of the sensitivity improvement is related to accuracy of the individual mass-splitting measurements and requires strict control on the relative energy scale uncertainty of the near and far detectors. We study the impact of both baseline and target mass of the near detector on the combined sensitivity. A figure-of-merit is defined to optimize the baseline and target mass of the near detector and the optimal selections are $\sim$13~km and $\sim$4~kton respectively for a far detector with the 20~kton target mass and 52.5~km baseline. As typical examples of future medium baseline reactor neutrino experiments, the optimal location and target mass of the near detector are selected for JUNO and RENO-50. Finally, we discuss distinct effects of the neutrino spectrum uncertainty for setups of a single detector and double detectors, which indicate that the spectrum uncertainty can be well constrained in the presence of the near detector.

7 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Damping signatures at JUNO, a medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiment
• Studying the neutrino wave-packet effects at medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments and the potential benefits of an extra detector
• A new way to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy at reactors
• Fully Constrained Majorana Neutrino Mass Matrices Using $\Sigma (72\times 3)$
• Potential impact of sub-structure on the resolution of neutrino mass hierarchy at medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments