Physics Potential of the Fermilab NuMI beamline

Abstract

We explore the physics potential of the NuMI beamline with a detector located 10 km off-axis at a distant site (810 km). We study the sensitivity to $\sin^2 2 \theta_{13}$ and to the CP-violating parameter $\sin \delta$ as well as the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy by exploiting the $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ and $\bar{\nu}_\mu \to \bar{\nu}_e$ appearance channels. The results are illustrated for three different experimental setups to quantify the benefits of increased detector sizes, proton luminosities and $\nu_e$ detection efficiencies.