The Neutrino Mass Hierarchy from Nuclear Reactor Experiments

Understand

10 years from now reactor neutrino experiments will attempt to determine which neutrino mass eigenstate is the most massive.

• In this letter we present the results of more than seven million detailed simulations of such experiments, studying the dependence of the probability of successfully determining the mass hierarchy upon the analysis method, the neutrino mass matrix parameters, reactor flux models, geoneutrinos and, in particular, combinations of baselines.
• We show that a recently reported spurious dependence of the data analysis upon the high energy tail of the reactor spectrum can be removed by using a weighted Fourier transform.
• We determine the optimal baselines and corresponding detector locations.