The silver channel at the neutrino factory Original Research Article

We notice that looking for νe→ντ at the same time as νe→νμ oscillations could significantly help to reduce the errors in the leptonic CP-violating phase δ measurement. We show how the νe→νμ (“golden”) and νe→ντ (“silver”) transitions observed at an OPERA-like 2 kton lead-emulsion detector at L=732 km, in combination with the νe→νμ transitions observed at a 40 kton magnetized iron detector with a baseline of L=3000 km, strongly reduce the so-called (θ13,δ) ambiguity. We also show how a moderate increase in the OPERA-like detector mass (4 kton instead of 2 kton) completely eliminates the clone regions even for small values of θ13.