The MOMENT to search for CP violation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of the MOMENT neutrino experiment to detect leptonic CP violation, emphasizing the importance of background suppression and charge identification, and highlighting its synergy with existing experiments.

Contribution

First analysis of MOMENT's sensitivity to leptonic CP violation, focusing on detector performance and background suppression strategies.

Findings

MOMENT can be competitive if charge ID exceeds 80%.

Atmospheric background suppression by a factor of ten is crucial.

Significant synergy with T2K and NOvA enhances sensitivity.

Abstract

In this letter, we analyze for the first time the physics reach in terms of sensitivity to leptonic CP violation of the proposed MuOn-decay MEdium baseline NeuTrino beam (MOMENT) experiment, a novel neutrino oscillation facility that would operate with neutrinos from muon decay. Apart from obtaining a sufficiently intense flux, the bottlenecks to the physics reach of this experiment will be achieving a high enough suppression of the atmospheric background and, particularly, attaining a sufficient level of charge identification. We thus present our results as a function of these two factors. As for the detector, we consider a very massive Gd-doped Water Cherenkov detector. We find that MOMENT will be competitive with other currently planned future oscillation experiments if a charge identification of at least 80 % can be achieved at the same time that the atmospheric background can be suppressed by at least a factor of ten. We also find a large synergy of MOMENT with the current generation of neutrino oscillation experiments, T2K and NOvA, which significantly enhances its final sensitivity.