On the improvement of the low energy neutrino factory

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how varying experimental parameters affects the performance of a low energy neutrino factory, highlighting the importance of statistical improvements over adding new detection channels for measuring neutrino oscillation parameters.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of experimental design choices on the sensitivity of a low energy neutrino factory to key neutrino parameters.

Findings

Adding the 'platinum' channel offers limited practical benefit due to backgrounds.

Increasing statistics in the 'golden' channel significantly improves sensitivity.

A low energy neutrino factory can effectively measure theta13, delta, and the mass hierarchy.

Abstract

The low energy neutrino factory has been proposed as a very sensitive setup for future searches for CP violation and matter effects. Here we study how its performance is affected when the experimental specifications of the setup are varied. Most notably, we have considered the addition of the 'platinum' nu_{mu} -> nu_{e} channel. We find that, whilst theoretically the extra channel provides very useful complementary information and helps to lift degeneracies, its practical usefulness is lost when considering realistic background levels. Conversely, an increase in statistics in the 'golden' nu_{e} -> nu_{mu} channel and, to some extent, an improvement in the energy resolution, lead to an important increase in the performance of the facility, given the rich energy dependence of the 'golden' channel at these energies. We show that a low energy neutrino factory with a baseline of 1300 km, muon energy of 4.5 GeV, and either a 20 kton totally active scintillating detector or 100 kton liquid argon detector, can have outstanding sensitivity to the neutrino oscillation parameters theta13, delta and the mass hierarchy. For our estimated exposure of 2.8 x 10^{23} kton x decays per muon polarity, the low energy neutrino factory has sensitivity to theta13 and delta for sin^{2}(2theta13) > 10^{-4} and to the mass hierarchy for sin^{2}(2theta13) > 10^{-3}.