Experimental Conditions for Determination of the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy with Reactor Antineutrinos

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This article reports the optimized experimental requirements to determine neutrino mass hierarchy using electron antineutrinos (νₑ) generated in a nuclear reactor. The features of the neutrino mass hierarchy can be extracted from the |Δm²₃₁| and |Δm²₃₂| oscillations by applying the Fourier sine and cosine transform to the L/E spectrum. To determine the neutrino mass hierarchy above 90% probability, the requirements on the energy resolution as a function of the baseline are studied at 2θ₁₃=0.1. If the energy resolution of the neutrino detector is less than 0.04/ √Eν and the determination probability obtained from Bayes' theorem is above 90%, the detector needs to be located around 48--53 km from the reactor(s) to measure the energy spectrum of νₑ. These results will be helpful for setting up an experiment to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, which is an important problem in neutrino physics.