Studying the neutrino wave-packet effects at medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments and the potential benefits of an extra detector

• Main Authors: Zhaokan Cheng, Wei Wang, Chan Fai Wong, Jingbo Zhang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-03-01
• Series: Nuclear Physics B
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0550321321000018

We examine the potential of the future medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation (MBRO) experiments in studying neutrino wave-packet impact. In our study, we treat neutrinos as wave packets and use the corresponding neutrino flavor transition probabilities. The delocalization, separation and spreading of the wave packets lead to decoherence and dispersion effects, which modify the plane-wave neutrino oscillation pattern, by amounts that depend on the energy uncertainties in the initial neutrino wave packets. We find that MBRO experiments could be sensitive to the wave-packet impact, since the baseline is long enough and also the capability of observing small corrections to the neutrino oscillations due to excellent detector energy resolution. Besides studying the constraints on the decoherence parameter, we also examine the potential wave-packet impacts on the precision of measuring θ12 and other oscillation parameters in the future medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiments. Moreover, we also probe the potential benefits of an additional detector for studying such exotic neutrino physics.