Interference between the Atmospheric and Solar Oscillation Amplitudes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect interference between atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillation modes, highlighting JUNO's potential to observe this effect with high significance, thereby advancing understanding of neutrino properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to decompose neutrino oscillation amplitudes and demonstrates JUNO's capability to observe interference effects with high confidence.

Findings

Interference between atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillations can be detected.

JUNO can observe this interference with over 4 sigma significance.

The method is robust against systematic uncertainties.

Abstract

We propose to detect the interference effect between the atmospheric-scale and solar-scale waves of neutrino oscillation, one of the key consequences of the three-generation structure of leptons. In vacuum, we show that there is a natural and general way of decomposing the oscillation amplitude into these two oscillation modes. The nature of the interference is cleanest in the $\bar{\nu}_e$ disappearance channel since it is free from the CP-phase $\delta$. We find that the upcoming JUNO experiment offers an ideal setting to observe this interference with more than $4\,\sigma$ significance, even under conservative assumptions about the systematic uncertainties.