We study the physics potential of a neutrino superbeam experiment with a 2540 km baseline. We assume a neutrino beam similar to the NuMI beam in medium energy configuration. We consider a 100 kton totally active scintillator detector at a 7 mr off-axis location. We find that such a configuration has outstanding hierarchy discriminating capability. In conjunction with the data from the present reactor neutrino experiments, it can determine the neutrino mass hierarchy at 3 sigma level in less than 5 years, if sin^2(2*theta13) > 0.01, running in the neutrino mode alone. As a stand alone experiment, with a 5 year neutrino run and a 5 year anti-neutrino run, it can determine non-zero theta13 at 3 sigma level if sin^2(2*theta13) > 7*10^{-3} and hierarchy at 3 sigma level if sin^2(2*theta13) > 8*10^{-3}. This data can also distinguish deltaCP = pi/2 from the CP conserving values of 0 and pi, for sin^2(2*theta13) > 0.02.
@article{arxiv.1011.1146,
title = {Physics Potential of a 2540 Km Baseline Superbeam Experiment},
author = {Aniket Joglekar and Suprabh Prakash and Sushant K. Raut and S. Uma Sankar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1011.1146},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
16 pages, 7 figures and 1 table: Published version