Comparison of the calorimetric and kinematic methods of neutrino energy reconstruction in disappearance experiments

TL;DR

This paper compares calorimetric and kinematic methods for neutrino energy reconstruction in disappearance experiments, highlighting the importance of detector performance accuracy to prevent biases in oscillation parameter measurements.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how realistic detector capabilities impact energy reconstruction accuracy and compares the robustness of calorimetric and kinematic methods.

Findings

Calorimetric method requires ~10% detector performance accuracy to avoid bias.

Kinematic method shows less sensitivity to detector overestimation.

Detector performance estimation is crucial for precise neutrino oscillation measurements.

Abstract

To be able to achieve their physics goals, future neutrino-oscillation experiments will need to reconstruct the neutrino energy with very high accuracy. In this work, we analyze how the energy reconstruction may be affected by realistic detection capabilities, such as energy resolutions, efficiencies, and thresholds. This allows us to estimate how well the detector performance needs to be determined a priori in order to avoid a sizable bias in the measurement of the relevant oscillation parameters. We compare the kinematic and calorimetric methods of energy reconstruction in the context of two muon-neutrino disappearance experiments operating in different energy regimes. For the calorimetric reconstruction method, we find that the detector performance has to be estimated with a ~10% accuracy to avoid a significant bias in the extracted oscillation parameters. On the other hand, in the case of kinematic energy reconstruction, we observe that the results exhibit less sensitivity to an overestimation of the detector capabilities.