Gain fractions of future neutrino oscillation facilities over T2K and NOvA

Abstract: We evaluate the probability of future neutrino oscillation facilities to discover leptonic CP violation and/or measure the neutrino mass hierarchy. We study how this probability is affected by positive or negative hints for these observables to be found at T2K and NOνA. We consider the following facilities: LBNE; T2HK; and the 10 GeV Neutrino Factory (NF10), and show how their discovery probabilities change with the running time of T2K and NOνA conditioned to their results. We find that, if after 15 years T2K and NOνA have not observed a 90 % CL hint of CP violation, then LBNE and T2HK have less than a 10 % chance of achieving a 5σ discovery, whereas NF10 still has a ∼ 40 % chance to do so. Conversely, if T2K and NOνA have an early 90 % CL hint in 5 years from now, T2HK has a rather large chance to achieve a 5σ CP violation discovery (75 % or 55%, depending on whether the mass hierarchy is known or not). This is to be compared with the 90% (30%) probability that NF10 (LBNE) would have to observe the same signal at 5σ. A hierarchy measurement at 5σ is achievable at both LBNE and NF10 with more than 90 % probability, irrespectively of the outcome of T2K and NOνA. We also find that if LBNE or a similar very long baseline super-beam is the only next generation facility to be built, then it is very useful to continue running T2K and NOνA (or at least T2K) beyond their original schedule in order to increase the CP violation discovery chances, given their complementarity. ar X i