Earth-Density Effects in Long Baseline Neutrino Experiments

Abstract

Earth matter density uncertainties play a non trivial role in three flavor neutrino oscillations in matter, particularly for the muon to electron appearance channel that underpins CP violation measurements in long baseline experiments. We demonstrate that when realistic spatial variations of the Earths density are taken into account, the oscillation probabilities acquire additional, energy dependent structures that cannot be captured by path-averaged density approximations. We show that mismodeling of the matter density profile can introduce degeneracies that obscure genuine leptonic CP violating effects, thereby degrading parameter sensitivity and biasing the inference of the CP phase. Identifying energy regions in which CP sensitivity remains robust against matter density uncertainties is therefore essential. These considerations indicate that marginalization over a single effective density parameter is insufficient for next generation precision measurements and motivate the incorporation of spatially resolved Earth density profiles in the analysis frameworks of future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments.