English

Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with IceCube

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2013-09-03 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We present the first statistically significant detection of neutrino oscillations in the high-energy regime (>> 20 GeV) from an analysis of IceCube Neutrino Observatory data collected in 2010-2011. This measurement is made possible by the low energy threshold of the DeepCore detector (20\sim 20 GeV) and benefits from the use of the IceCube detector as a veto against cosmic ray-induced muon background. The oscillation signal was detected within a low-energy muon neutrino sample (20 -- 100 GeV) extracted from data collected by DeepCore. A high-energy muon neutrino sample (100 GeV -- 10 TeV) was extracted from IceCube data to constrain systematic uncertainties. Disappearance of low-energy upward-going muon neutrinos was observed, and the non-oscillation hypothesis is rejected with more than 5σ5\sigma significance. In a two-neutrino flavor formalism, our data are best described by the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters Δm232=(2.30.5+0.6)103\Delta m^2_{23}= (2.3^{+0.6}_{-0.5})\cdot 10^{-3} eV2^2 and sin2(2θ23)>0.93\sin^2(2 \theta_{23})>0.93, and maximum mixing is favored.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.3909,
  title  = {Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with IceCube},
  author = {The IceCube Collaboration},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.3909},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PRL