Statistical Significance of CP Violation in Long Baseline Neutrino Experiments

TL;DR

This paper discusses methods to evaluate the statistical significance of CP violation in long baseline neutrino experiments, including p-value calculations, background considerations, and combining results across experiments.

Contribution

It introduces comprehensive statistical methods for assessing CP violation significance, accounting for backgrounds and data variations, and provides tools for optimizing and comparing experimental results.

Findings

Methods for calculating p-values with background events

Graphical tools for interpreting CP violation significance

Techniques for combining p-values from multiple experiments

Abstract

The p-value or statistical significance of a CP conservation null hypothesis test is determined from counting electron neutrino and antineutrino appearance oscillation events. The statistical estimates include cases with background events and different data sample sizes, graphical plots to interpret results and methods to combine p-values from different experiments. These estimates are useful for optimizing the search for CP violation with different amounts of neutrino and antineutrino beam running, comparing results from different experiments and for simple cross checks of more elaborate statistical estimates that use likelihood fitting of neutrino parameters.