An Appearance-Like Reactor Experiment To Measure Ue3

Abstract

Conventional reactor neutrino experiments are dissapearance experiments, and thus have less sensitivity to small mixing angles than appearance experiments do. It has been recently shown that future reactor neutrino experiments consisiting of a near and far detector are competitive with first-generation superbeams in order to determine sin^2{2 theta_{13}} down to 10^{-2}. We show that by using the antineutrino-electron elastic scattering at the near detector around the configuration where dsigma^{barν_e}/dT presents a dynamical zero, an appearance-like experiment can be simulated, with a sensitivity comparable to the one achieved with the inverse beta-decay reaction in the far detector. Thus, the near detector could also be used to look for oscillations. We present how antineutrino-electron elastic scattering could be properly used for this purpose allowing that the combination of the measurements in the far detector and in the near detector would push the sensitivity of the experiment to a lower value of theta_{13}.