NOvA and T2K: The race for the neutrino mass hierarchy

Abstract

The determination of the ordering of the neutrino masses (the hierarchy) is probably a crucial prerequisite to understand the origin of lepton masses and mixings and to establish their relationship to the analogous properties in the quark sector. Here, we follow an alternative strategy to the usual neutrino--antineutrino comparison in long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments: we exploit the combination of the neutrino-only data from the NOvA and the T2K experiments by performing these two off-axis experiments at different distances but at the same $<E >/L$, where $<E >$ is the mean neutrino energy and $L$ is the baseline. This would require a minor adjustment to the proposed off-axis angle for one or both of the proposed experiments.