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High Energy Physics - Phenomenology, hep-ph
Abstract:
Determining the type of the neutrino mass ordering (normal versus inverted)
is one of the most important open questions in neutrino physics. In this paper
we clarify the statistical interpretation of sensitivity calculations for this
measurement. We employ standard frequentist methods of hypothesis testing in
order to precisely define terms like the median sensitivity of an experiment.
We consider a test statistic $T$ which in a certain limit will be normal
distributed. We show that the median sensitivity in this limit is very close to
standard sensitivities based on $\Delta\chi^2$ values from a data set without
statistical fluctuations, such as widely used in the literature. Furthermore,
we perform an explicit Monte Carlo simulation of the INO, JUNO, LBNE, NOvA, and
PINGU experiments in order to verify the validity of the Gaussian limit, and
provide a comparison of the expected sensitivities for those experiments.
