Determination of the θ23 octant in long baseline neutrino experiments within and beyond the standard model

Abstract

The recent data indicate that the neutrino mixing angle θ 23 deviates from the maximal-mixing value of 45°, showing two nearly degenerate solutions, one in the lower octant (LO) ( θ 23 < 4 5 ° ) and one in the higher octant (HO) ( θ 23 > 4 5 ° ). We investigate, using numerical simulations, the prospects for determining the octant of θ 23 in the future long baseline oscillation experiments. We present our results as contour plots on the ( θ 23 − 4 5 ° , δ )–plane, where δ is the C P phase, showing the true values of θ 23 for which the octant can be experimentally determined at 3 σ , 2 σ and 1 σ confidence level. In particular, we study the impact of the possible nonunitarity of neutrino mixing on the experimental determination of θ 23 in those experiments.