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CP violation versus the matter effect in long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments

Abstract:

We investigate, within the framework of three generations of neutrinos, the effects of CP violation in long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. We aim at illuminating the global feature of the interplay between a genuine effect due to the CP-violating phase and a fake one due to the Earth matter effect. To this goal, we develop a formalism based on the adiabatic approximation and perturbative treatment of the matter effect which allows us to obtain approximate analytic expressions of the oscillation probabilities. We present an order-of-magnitude estimation and a detailed numerical computation of the absolute and the relative magnitudes of the CP violations under the mass hierarchy suggested by the atmospheric neutrino anomaly and the cosmological dark matter. We find that the genuine CP-violating effect is at most ∼ 1%, and the matter effect dominates over the intrinsic CP violation only in a region of parameters where the oscillation probability of μ→νe is large. © 1998 The American Physical Society.