DUNE Beam-Energy Dependence of Sensitivity to the Violation of the Equivalence Principle

In this work, we investigate the dependence of DUNE’s sensitivity to possible violations of the equivalence principle (VEP) on the beam-energy configuration, comparing the Low-Energy (LE) and Medium-Energy (ME) beams. We find that the LE configuration generally provides stronger constraints on the VEP parameters than the ME configuration. For ${\theta }_{23}={43}^{\circ }$, the LE configuration constrains $\mathrm{\Phi }\mathrm{\Delta }{\gamma }_{21}$ and $\mathrm{\Phi }\mathrm{\Delta }{\gamma }_{31}$ to $8.47\times {10}^{-24}$ and $8.53\times {10}^{-24}$, respectively, at the $3\sigma$ CL. The appearance channels shows stronger phase-dependency degeneracies while the disappearance channels exhibits smoother exclusion sensitivity. This work further confirms the advantage of the LE configuration over the ME, in constraining the correlated VEP parameter space. For the assumed true value of ${\theta }_{23}={43}^{\circ }$, The LE configuration restricts the VEP parameter space to $\Phi \mathrm{\Delta }{\gamma }_{21}\in [-8.47,8.47]\times {10}^{-24}$ and $\Phi \mathrm{\Delta }{\gamma }_{31}\in [-8.53,8.53]\times {10}^{-24}$ at $3\sigma$.We also find that neutrino-mode and antineutrino-mode running can independently probe VEP effects at DUNE, with the relative sensitivity depending on the beam-energy configuration. These results highlight the importance of beam-energy optimization and channel-wise analysis in exploring possible violations of the equivalence principle at DUNE.