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 ${\sin }^{2}2{\theta }_{13}$ and to the CP-violating parameter $\sin \delta$ as well as the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy by exploiting the ${\nu }_{\mu }\to {\nu }_e$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }\to {\bar{\nu }}_e$ appearance channels. The results are illustrated for three different experimental setups to quantify the benefits of increased detector sizes, proton luminosities and ${\nu }_e$ detection efficiencies.

Comments: 23 pages, 12 figures