Neutrino mass hierarchy and octant determination with atmospheric neutrinos
Abstract
The recent discovery by the Daya-Bay and RENO experiments, that \theta_{13} is nonzero and relatively large, significantly impacts existing experiments and the planning of future facilities. In many scenarios, the nonzero value of \theta_{13} implies that \theta_{23} is likely to be different from \pi/4. Additionally, large detectors will be sensitive to matter effects on the oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, making it possible to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy and the octant of \theta_{23}. We show that a 50 kT magnetized liquid argon neutrino detector can ascertain the mass hierarchy with a significance larger than 4 sigma with moderate exposure times, and the octant at the level of 2-3 sigma with greater exposure.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1203.6012,
title = {Neutrino mass hierarchy and octant determination with atmospheric neutrinos},
author = {Vernon Barger and Raj Gandhi and Pomita Ghoshal and Srubabati Goswami and Danny Marfatia and Suprabh Prakash and Sushant K. Raut and S. Uma Sankar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.6012},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures. Version published in Phys. Rev. Lett