Short-baseline neutrino oscillation waves in ultra-large liquid scintillator detectors

Powerful new multi-kiloton liquid scintillator neutrino detectors, including NOνA and, possibly, LENA, will come on-line within the next decade. When coupled with a modest-power decay-at-rest (DAR) neutrino source at short-baseline, these detectors can decisively address signals for neutrino oscilla...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Agarwalla, Sanjib Kumar, Conrad, Janet, Shaevitz, M. H.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Spring Berlin/Heidelberg 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71826
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6393-0438
Description
Summary:Powerful new multi-kiloton liquid scintillator neutrino detectors, including NOνA and, possibly, LENA, will come on-line within the next decade. When coupled with a modest-power decay-at-rest (DAR) neutrino source at short-baseline, these detectors can decisively address signals for neutrino oscillations at high Δm2. Along the greater than 50 m length of the detector, the characteristic oscillation wave will be apparent, providing powerful verification of the oscillation phenomenon. LENA can simultaneously perform νμ → νe appearance and νe → νe disappearance searches while NOνA is likely limited to νe disappearance. For the appearance channel, a LENA-like detector could test the LSND and MiniBooNE signal regions at >5 σ with a fiducial volume of 5 kt and a 10 kW neutrino source. The LENA and NOνA νe disappearance sensitivities are complementary to the recent reactor anomaly indicating possible νe disappearance and would cover this possible oscillation signal at ~3 σ.