Resolving parameter degeneracies in long-baseline experiments by atmospheric neutrino data

by Thomas Schwetz (SISSA, Trieste)

Thursday 17 Mar 2005, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

In this talk I show that the physics reach of a long-baseline (LBL) neutrino oscillation experiment based on a superbeam and a megaton water Cherenkov detector can be significantly increased if the LBL data are combined with data from atmospheric neutrinos provided by the same detector. So-called parameter degeneracies are a severe problem for LBL experiments. It is shown that three-flavour effects in atmospheric neutrino data allow us to resolve these degeneracies to some extent. As a consequence, the ability to distinguish the normal from the inverted neutrino mass ordering is significantly improved with respect to LBL data only, and the potential to identify the true values of the leptonic mixing angle θ₁₃ and the CP-phase is significantly increased through the lifting of the degeneracies.