Experimental Requirements to Determine the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy Using Reactor Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper outlines the experimental setup and requirements, such as baseline distance and detector specifications, necessary to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy with over 90% probability using reactor neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It provides detailed experimental requirements and analysis methods for measuring the neutrino mass hierarchy with reactor neutrinos, including the use of Fourier transforms on the energy spectrum.

Findings

Optimal baseline around 58 km identified

Energy resolution and detector mass requirements specified

Achieving >90% probability depends on $ heta_{13}$ values

Abstract

This paper presents experimental requirements to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy using reactor neutrinos. The detector shall be located at a baseline around 58 km from the reactor(s) to measure the energy spectrum of electron antineutrinos ($\bar{\nu}_e$) precisely. By applying Fourier cosine and sine transform to the L/E spectrum, features of the neutrino mass hierarchy can be extracted from the $|\Delta{m}^2_{31}|$ and $|\Delta{m}^2_{32}|$ oscillations. To determine the neutrino mass hierarchy above 90% probability, requirements to the baseline, the energy resolution, the energy scale uncertainty, the detector mass and the event statistics are studied at different values of $\sin^2(2\theta_{13})$