Experimental conditions for determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy with reactor antineutrinos

Abstract

This article reports the optimized experimental requirements to determine neutrino mass hierarchy using electron antineutrinos (ν¯e) generated in a nuclear reactor. The features of the neutrino mass hierarchy can be extracted from the |Δm312| and |Δm322| oscillations by applying the Fourier sine and cosine transforms to the L/E spectrum. To determine the neutrino mass hierarchy above 90% probability, the requirements on the energy resolution as a function of the baseline are studied at sin2⁡2θ13=0.1. If the energy resolution of the neutrino detector is less than 0.04/Eν and the determination probability obtained from Bayes' theorem is above 90%, the detector needs to be located around 48–53 km from the reactor(s) to measure the energy spectrum of ν¯e. These results will be helpful for setting up an experiment to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, which is an important problem in neutrino physics.