Probing the leptonic Dirac CP-violating phase in neutrino oscillation experiments

Abstract

The discovery of leptonic CP violation is one of the primary goals of next-generation neutrino oscillation experiments, which is feasible due to the recent measurement of a relatively large leptonic mixing angle θ_{13}. We suggest two new working observables ΔA^{\rm m}_{αβ} \equiv \max[A^{\rm CP}_{αβ}(δ)] - \min[A^{\rm CP}_{αβ}(δ)] and ΔA^{\rm CP}_{αβ}(δ) \equiv A^{\rm CP}_{αβ}(δ) - A^{\rm CP}_{αβ}(0) to describe the CP-violating effects in long-baseline and atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments. The former signifies the experimental sensitivity to the leptonic Dirac CP-violating phase $δ$ and can be used to optimize the experimental setup, while the latter measures the intrinsic leptonic CP violation and can be used to extract $δ$ directly from the experimental observations. Both analytical and numerical analyses are carried out to illustrate their main features. It turns out that an intense neutrino beam with sub-GeV energies and a baseline of a few 100 km may serve as an optimal experimental setup for probing leptonic CP violation.