Unitarity test of lepton mixing via energy dependence of neutrino oscillation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to test the unitarity of the lepton mixing matrix using energy-dependent neutrino oscillation data from long baseline experiments, enabling direct extraction of matrix elements and unitarity verification.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent approach to test lepton mixing unitarity through energy dependence analysis in long baseline experiments, including a simplified matter effect neglect scenario.

Findings

Demonstrated potential to observe unitarity violation in a four-generation model.

Identified energy dependence of CP conjugate modes as most statistically significant.

Showed that unitarity tests can be performed without specific parametrization.

Abstract

We study the method to test the unitarity of the lepton mixing matrix by using only the long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, such as the combination of the T2HK experiment and the one with the $\nu_e$ beam from a future neutrino factory at J-PARC. Without a specific parametrization, one can directly extract the elements of the lepton mixing matrix by observing the energy dependence of the oscillation probabilities. A non-trivial test of the unitarity under the three-generation assumption can thus be made possible by examining the orthogonality in a similar manner to the unitarity triangle in the quark sector. As the first trial, we perform the analysis based on the simplified situation where the matter effects in the neutrino oscillation can be neglected. Under this simplified analysis, we demonstrate the observation of the unitarity violation in the $3\times3$ part of the lepton mixing matrix for a parameter set in the four-generation model. The statistically most significant measurement can be provided by the energy dependences of the combination of the CP conjugate modes, $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ and $\bar \nu_\mu \to \bar \nu_e$, at T2HK and, independently, by the T conjugate modes, $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ and $\nu_e \to \nu_\mu$, with the latter measured at the neutrino factory experiments.