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Exploring Earth's Matter Effect in High-Precision Long-Baseline Experiments

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2021-10-22 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

The Earth's matter effect is going to play a crucial role in measuring the unknown three-flavor neutrino oscillation parameters at high confidence level in future high-precision long-baseline experiments. We observe that owing to the new degeneracies among the most uncertain oscillation parameters (δCP,θ23\delta_{CP}, \theta_{23}) and the average Earth's matter density (ρavg\rho_{avg}) for the 1300 km baseline, the sensitivity of the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to establish Earth's matter effect reaches only about 2σ\sigma C.L. for all possible choices of oscillation parameters. We notice that the current uncertainty in δCP\delta_{CP} degrades the measurement of ρavg\rho_{avg} more as compared to θ23\theta_{23}. To lift these degeneracies, we explore the possible complementarity between DUNE and Tokai to Hyper-Kamiokande (T2HK/JD) facility with a second detector in Korea, popularly known as T2HKK or JD+KD setup. While DUNE uses wide-band beam with on-axis detector, T2HKK setup plans to use narrow-band beam with two off-axis detectors: one in Japan and other in Korea. We exhibit how the high-precision measurement of δCP\delta_{CP} in JD+KD setup and the information on ρavg\rho_{avg} coming from DUNE can reduce the impact of these degeneracies in both (ρavgδCP\rho_{avg}-\delta_{CP}) and (ρavgθ23\rho_{avg}-\theta_{23}) planes. We show that the combined data from DUNE and JD+KD setups can establish Earth's matter effect at more than 6σ\sigma C.L. irrespective of both the choices of mass hierarchy: normal (NH) and inverted (IH), δCP\delta_{CP}, and θ23\theta_{23}. With the help of this combined data set, we can measure the average matter density (ρavg\rho_{avg}) with a relative 1σ\sigma precision of around 11.2% (9.4%) assuming true NH (IH) and δCP=90/90\delta_{CP} = -90^{\circ}/90^{\circ}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.11215,
  title  = {Exploring Earth's Matter Effect in High-Precision Long-Baseline Experiments},
  author = {Masoom Singh and Sanjib Kumar Agarwalla},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.11215},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures; contribution to proceedings of The European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP2021)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:04:41.816Z