Speaker
Prof.
Sankagiri Umasankar
(Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)
Description
The moderately large value of theta13, measured recently
by reactor experiments, is very welcome
news for the future neutrino experiments. In particular,
the NOvA experiment, with 3 years of neutrino run followed
by an equal anti-neutrino run, will be able to
determine the mass hierarchy if one of the following
two favourable combinations is true:
normal hierarchy with the CP phase in the lower half plane or
inverted hierarchy with the CP phase in the upper half plane.
In this report, we study the hierarchy reach of the
first 3 years of NOvA data.
Since sin**2(2*theta23) is measured to be non-maximal,
theta23 can be either in the lower or higher octant.
Pure neutrino data is affected by theta13-hierarchy and
octant-hierarchy degeneracies, which limit the hierarchy
sensitivity of such data. A combination of neutrino and
anti-neutrino data is not subject to these degeneracies and
hence has much better hierarchy discrimination capability.
We find that, with a 3 year neutrino run, hierarchy determination
is possible for only two of the four octant-hierarchy combinations.
Equal 1.5 year runs in neutrino and anti-neutrino modes give good
hierarchy sensitivity for all the four combinations.
Primary author
Prof.
Sankagiri Umasankar
(Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)
Co-authors
Dr.
Suprabh Prakash
(Harish-Chandra Research Institute)
Mr.
Ushak Rahaman
(Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)
