Reactor Neutrino Experiments with a Large Liquid Scintillator Detector

Abstract

We discuss several new ideas for reactor neutrino oscillation experiments with a Large Liquid Scintillator Detector. We consider two different scenarios for a measurement of the small mixing angle ${\theta }_{13}$ with a mobile ${\bar{\nu }}_e$ source: a nuclear-powered ship, such as a submarine or an icebreaker, and a land-based scenario with a mobile reactor. The former setup can achieve a sensitivity to ${\sin }^{2}2{\theta }_{13}\lesssim 0.003$ at the 90% confidence level, while the latter performs only slightly better than Double Chooz. Furthermore, we study the precision that can be achieved for the solar parameters, ${\sin }^{2}2{\theta }_{12}$ and $\Delta m_{21}^2$, with a mobile reactor and with a conventional power station. With the mobile reactor, a precision slightly better than from current global fit data is possible, while with a power reactor, the accuracy can be reduced to less than 1%. Such a precision is crucial for testing theoretical models, e.g. quark-lepton complementarity.

Comments: 18 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, revised version, to appear in JHEP, Fig. 1 extended, Formula added, minor changes, results unchanged