The Physics of antineutrinos in DUNE and resolution of octant degeneracy

Abstract

We study the capability of the DUNE experiment, which will be the first beam based experiment with a wide band flux profile, to uncover the octant of the leptonic mixing angle $\theta_{23}$ (i.e., $\theta_{23}$ is $< 45^\circ$ or $>45^\circ$). In this work, we find that for the DUNE baseline of 1300 km, due to enhanced matter effect, the neutrino and antineutrino probabilities are different which creates a tension in the case of combined runs because of which octant sensitivity also can come from disappearance channel. In view of this, we study the physics of antineutrinos in DUNE and explore the role of antineutrinos run that is required to resolve the octant degeneracy at a certain confidence levels.