Physics Potential of the Fermilab NuMI beamline

Abstract

We explore the physics potential of the NuMI beamline with a detector located 10 km off-axis at a distant site (810 km). We study the sensitivity to $\sin^2 2 θ_{13}$ and to the CP-violating parameter $\sin δ$ as well as the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy by exploiting the $ν_μ\to ν_e$ and $\barν_μ\to \barν_e$ appearance channels. The results are illustrated for three different experimental setups to quantify the benefits of increased detector sizes, proton luminosities and $ν_e$ detection efficiencies.

23 pages, 12 figures