Effect of invisible neutrino decay on neutrino oscillation at long baselines

Abstract

In this article, we study the effect of invisible neutrino decay of the third neutrino state for accelerator neutrino experiments at two different baselines, 1300 km with a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) detector (similar to DUNE) and 2588 km with a water Cherenkov detector (similar to P2O). For such baselines, the matter effect starts to become important. Our aim is to ascertain the sensitivity to mass hierarchy and octant of $\theta_{23}$ in these two experiments in the presence of a decaying neutrino state. We compare and contrast the results of the two experimental setups. We find that, in general, hierarchy sensitivity decreases in the presence of decay. However, if we consider decay only in the opposite hierarchy (test scenario), in the 2588 km setup, the hierarchy sensitivity with the true hierarchy as IH is larger than the no decay case. We also study the dependence of hierarchy sensitivity with true $\theta_{23}$. We find that the dominant muon background in P2O plays an important role in how the hierarchy sensitivity depends on $\theta_{23}$. The octant sensitivity for both setups increases in the presence of decay except for the LArTPC setup in case true $\theta_{23}=49^\circ$. To understand the octant sensitivity results in the two setups, we check the synergy in sensitivity between electron and muon channels as a function of test $\theta_{23}$. We also study the degeneracies in the test $\theta_{23}-\delta_{CP}$ plane and find that combined analysis of the two setups removes all the degeneracies in the test $\theta_{23}-\delta_{CP}$ plane at $5\sigma$ significance.