Two experiments for the price of one? the role of the second oscillation maximum in long baseline neutrino experiments

Abstract

We investigate the quantitative impact that data from the second oscillation maximum has on the performance of wide band beam neutrino oscillation experiments. We present results for the physics sensitivities to standard three avor oscillation, as well as results for the sensitivity to non-standard interactions. The quantitative study is performed using an experimental setup similar to the Fermilab to DUSEL Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE). We find that, with the single exception of sensitivity to the mass hierarchy, the second maximum plays only a marginal role due to the experimental difficulties to obtain a statistically significant and suficiently background-free event sample at low energies. This conclusion is valid for both water Čerenkov and liquid argon detectors. Moreover, we confirm that non-standard neutrino interactions are very hard to distinguish experimentally from standard three-flavor effects and can lead to a considerable loss of sensitivity to θ13, the mass hierarchy and CP violation. © SISSA 2011.