NOvA and T2K: The race for the neutrino mass hierarchy

Abstract

The determination of the ordering of the neutrino masses (the hierarchy) is probably a crucial prerequisite to understand the origin of lepton masses and mixings and to establish their relationship to the analogous properties in the quark sector. Here, we follow an alternative strategy to the usual neutrino--antineutrino comparison in long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments: we exploit the combination of the neutrino-only data from the NOvA and the T2K experiments by performing these two off-axis experiments at different distances but at the same $<E>/L$, where $<E>$ is the mean neutrino energy and $L$ is the baseline. This would require a minor adjustment to the proposed off-axis angle for one or both of the proposed experiments.

19 pages, 7 figures, LaTEX

References in corpus (4)

• Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation by the K2K Experiment
• Non-adiabatic Level Crossing in Resonant Neutrino Oscillations
• Resolving parameter degeneracies in long-baseline experiments by atmospheric neutrino data
• Determining Neutrino Mass Hierarchy by Precision Measurements in Electron and Muon Neutrino Disappearance Experiments

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Experimental Requirements to Determine the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy Using Reactor Neutrinos
• Testing non-unitarity of neutrino mixing matrices at neutrino factories
• A low energy neutrino factory for large ${\theta }_{13}$
• Neutrino mass hierarchy extraction using atmospheric neutrinos in ice
• Neutrino mass hierarchy and ${\theta }_{13}$ with a magic baseline beta-beam experiment
• A Neutrino Factory for both Large and Small theta_13
• Which long-baseline neutrino experiments are preferable?
• Combining CPT-conjugate Neutrino channels at Fermilab
• An intermediate gamma beta-beam neutrino experiment with long baseline
• Atmospheric neutrinos in ice and measurement of neutrino oscillation parameters
• A combined beta-beam and electron capture neutrino experiment
• Alleviating the present tension between T2K and NO$\nu$A with nonstandard neutrino interactions