Identifying and resolving the degeneracies in neutrino oscillation parameters in current experiments

Abstract

The three major unknown neutrino oscillation parameters at the present juncture are the mass hierarchy, the octant of the mixing angle θ23 and the CP phase δCP. It is well known that the presence of hierarchy−δCP and octant degeneracies affects the unambiguous determination of these parameters. In this paper we show a comprehensive way to study the remaining parameter degeneracies is in the form of generalized hierarchy−θ23−δCP degeneracy. This is best depicted as contours in the test (θ23−δCP) plane for different representative true values of parameters. We show that depending on whether the wrong-hierarchy and/or wrong-octant solutions occur in this plane with wrong or right value of δCP, a total of eight different possibilities can exist. These multiple solutions, apart from affecting the determination of the true hierarchy and octant, also affect the accurate estimation of δCP. We identify which of these eight different degenerate solutions can occur in the test (θ23−δCP) parameter space, taking the long-baseline experiment NOνA running in the neutrino mode as an example. Inclusion of the NOνA antineutrino run removes the wrong-octant solutions appearing with both right and wrong hierarchy. Adding T2K data to this resolve the wrong hierarchy -- right octant solutions to a large extent. The remaining wrong hierarchy solutions can be removed by combining NOνA + T2K with atmospheric neutrino data. We demonstrate this using ICAL@INO as the prototype atmospheric neutrino detector. We find that the degeneracies can be resolved at the 2σ level by the combined data set, for the true parameter space considered in the study.