Long Baseline Neutrino Physics: From Fermilab to Kamioka

Abstract

We have investigated the physics potential of very long baseline experiments designed to measure nu_mu to nu_e oscillation probabilities. The principles of our design are to tune the beam spectrum to the resonance energy for the matter effect, and to have the spectrum cut off rapidly above this energy. The matter effect amplifies the signal, and the cut-off suppresses backgrounds which feed-down from higher energy. The signal-to-noise ratio is potentially better than for any other conventional nu_mu beam experiment. We find that a beam from Fermilab aimed at the Super-K detector has excellent sensitivity to sin^2(2theta_13) and the sign of Delta M^2. If the mass hierarchy is inverted, the beam can be run in antineutrino mode with a similar signal-to-noise ratio, and event rate 55% as high as for the neutrino mode. Combining the Fermilab beam with the JHF-Kamioka proposal adds very complementary information. We find good sensitivity to maximal CP violation for values of sin^2(2theta_13) ranging from 0.001 to 0.05.