Neutrino mass hierarchy and electron neutrino oscillation parameters with one hundred thousand reactor events

Proposed medium-baseline reactor neutrino experiments offer unprecedented opportunities to probe, at the same time, the mass-mixing parameters which govern νe oscillations both at long wavelength (δm2 and θ12) and at short wavelength (Δm2 and θ13), as well as their tiny interference effects related to the mass hierarchy (i.e., the relative sign of Δm2 and δm2). In order to take full advantage of these opportunities, precision calculations and refined statistical analyses of event spectra are required. In such a context, we revisit several input ingredients, including nucleon recoil in inverse beta decay and its impact on energy reconstruction and resolution, hierarchy and matter effects in the oscillation probability, spread of reactor distances, irreducible backgrounds from geoneutrinos and from far reactors, and degeneracies between energy scale and spectrum shape uncertainties. We also introduce a continuous parameter α, which interpolates smoothly between normal hierarchy (α=+1) and inverted hierarchy (α=-1). The determination of the hierarchy is then transformed from a test of hypothesis to a parameter estimation, with a sensitivity given by the distance of the true case (either α=+1 or α=-1) from the "undecidable" case (α=0). Numerical experiments are performed for the specific setup envisaged for the JUNO project, assuming a realistic sample of O(105) reactor events. We find a typical sensitivity of ∼2σ to the hierarchy in JUNO, which, however, can be challenged by energy scale and spectrum shape systematics, whose possible conspiracy effects are investigated. The prospective accuracy reachable for the other mass-mixing parameters is also discussed. © 2014 American Physical Society.