Measuring the Leptonic CP Phase in Neutrino Oscillations with Non-Unitary Mixing

Abstract

Non-unitary neutrino mixing implies an extra CP violating phase that can fake the leptonic Dirac CP phase $\delta_{CP}$ of the simplest three-neutrino mixing benchmark scheme. This would hinder the possibility of probing for CP violation in accelerator-type experiments. We take T2K and T2HK as examples to demonstrate the degeneracy between the "standard" (or "unitary") and "non-unitary" CP phases. We find, under the assumption of non-unitary mixing, that their CP sensitivities severely deteriorate. Fortunately, the TNT2K proposal of supplementing T2(H)K with a $\mu$DAR source for better measurement of $\delta_{CP}$ can partially break the CP degeneracy by probing both $\cos \delta_{CP}$ and $\sin \delta_{CP}$ dependences in the wide spectrum of the $\mu$DAR flux. We also show that the further addition of a near detector to the $\mu$DAR setup can eliminate the degeneracy completely.