Leptonic CP Phase Determination from Fisher Information in T2K and NO$\nu$A

Abstract:The precise determination of the leptonic CP phase $\delta_{\rm CP}$ remains one of the central objectives of current and future long-baseline (LBL) neutrino oscillation experiments. Quantum estimation theory provides a natural framework to quantify the ultimate precision limits for estimating physical parameters encoded in quantum states. In this work, we employ the quantum Fisher information to investigate how much information about $\delta_{\rm CP}$ is intrinsically encoded in neutrino states and how efficiently it is extracted in present LBL experiments such as T2K and NO$\nu$A. We first analyze the intrinsic quantum sensitivity of neutrino and antineutrino states and demonstrate how matter effects generate a neutrino mass-ordering dependent information structure. To compare the intrinsic information content of the quantum state with the information experimentally accessible through flavor measurements, we compute the event-level Fisher information from reconstructed event spectra using Poisson statistics including backgrounds and systematics. We find that both experiments extract only a small fraction of the total information available in the underlying quantum state. This extraction efficiency becomes particularly suppressed near maximally CP-violating regions, where the reconstructed event spectra exhibit reduced sensitivity to small variations in $\delta_{\rm CP}$. We also apply the same framework to the reactor mixing angle $\theta_{13}$, providing a benchmark for comparison with the estimation of $\delta_{\rm CP}$. Our analysis provides a complementary information-theoretic perspective on precise estimation of oscillation parameters in LBL neutrino experiments.

v2: 39 pages, 15 figures; Matches the accepted version in Phys. Rev. D

arXiv:2605.30404 [hep-ph]

(or arXiv:2605.30404v2 [hep-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.30404 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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