Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with Very Large Volume Neutrino Telescopes

Abstract

Neutrino oscillations have been probed during the last few decades using multiple neutrino sources and experimental set-ups. In the recent years, very large volume neutrino telescopes have started contributing to the field. First ANTARES and then IceCube have relied on large and sparsely instrumented volumes to observe atmospheric neutrinos for combinations of baselines and energies inaccessible to other experiments. Using this advantage, the latest result from IceCube starts approaching the precision of other established technologies, and is paving the way for future detectors, such as ORCA and PINGU. These new projects seek to provide better measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters, and eventually determine the neutrino mass ordering. The results from running experiments and the potential from proposed projects are discussed in this review, emphasizing the experimental challenges involved in the measurements.2 The determination of the mass ordering is sometimes confused with the determination of the neutrino "mass hierarchy", which requires additional information on the absolute scale of the neutrino masses [5]. Typeset by REVT E X arXiv:1509.08404v2 [hep-ex] 3 Nov 2015

Neutrino Mass Ordering from Oscillations and Beyond: 2018 Status and Future Prospects

“…In particular, a 3σ determination of the mass ordering can be expected after only three years of data taking, with even higher significance for the case in which nature has chosen normal ordering and the upper octant for the atmospheric mixing angle. Several studies have been performed in order to analyze the sensitivity of ORCA to the standard oscillation parameters [355,356]. Its potential to determine the Earth matter density through neutrino oscillation tomography [357] or to test new physics scenarios [358,359] have also been extensively discussed.…”

Neutrino oscillation phenomenology in the standard model and beyond

“…In particular, a 3σ determination of the mass ordering can be expected after only three years of data taking, with even higher significance for the case in which nature has chosen normal ordering and the upper octant for the atmospheric mixing angle. Several studies have been performed in order to analyze the sensitivity of ORCA to the standard oscillation parameters [153,154] and also its potential to determine the Earth matter density through neutrino oscillation tomography [155].…”

Development of an analysis to probe the neutrino mass ordering with atmospheric neutrinos using three years of IceCube DeepCore data

“…Since U is non-diagonal, flavor changes are observed depending on the energy and propagation distance of a neutrino, which are commonly known as neutrino oscillations. The oscillations are described by the mass splittings, mixing angles, and the CP-violating phase [4].…”

“…The highest-energy oscillation maximum arises at E ν ∼ 25 GeV for vertically up-going neutrinos, moving to lower energy at shorter baselines towards the horizon. For energies above a few GeV, the oscillations are mostly driven by the parameters θ 23 and m 2 31 , which are therefore referred to as atmospheric oscillation parameters [4], while for vacuum only oscillations the value of θ 13 is too small for any detectable effect. Considering matter effects, however, the effective value of θ 13 under the right conditions can become sizeable, resulting in oscillation with electron flavors as shown in Fig.…”