Neutrino mass hierarchy determination and other physics potential of medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments

Understand

Medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments (MBRO) have been proposed to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy (MH) and to make precise measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters.

• With sufficient statistics, better than ~3%/\sqrt{E} energy resolution and well understood energy non-linearity, MH can be determined by analyzing oscillation signals driven by the atmospheric mass-squared difference in the survival spectrum of reactor antineutrinos.
• With such high performance MBRO detectors, oscillation parameters, such as \sin^22\theta_{12}, \Delta m^2_{21}, and \Delta m^2_{32}, can be measured to sub-percent level, which enables a future test of the PMNS matrix unitarity to ~1% level and helps the forthcoming neutrinoless double beta decay experiments to constrain the allowed <m_{\beta \beta}> values.
• Combined with results from the next generation long-baseline beam neutrino and atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments, the MH determination sensitivity can reach higher levels.