The need for an early anti-neutrino run of NOvA

Understand

The moderately large value of $\ty$, measured recently by reactor experiments, is very welcome news for the future neutrino experiments.

• In particular, the \nova experiment, with 3 years each of $\nu$ and $\anu$ runs, will be able to determine the mass hierarchy if one of the following two favourable combinations is true: normal hierarchy with $-180^\circ \leq \dcp \leq 0$ or inverted hierarchy with $0\leq \dcp \leq 180^\circ$.
• In this report, we study the hierarchy reach of the first 3 years of \nova data.
• Since $\sin^2 2 \tz$ is measured to be non-maximal, $\tz$ can be either in the lower or higher octant.