English

Oscillations of very low energy atmospheric neutrinos

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-06-30 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

There are several new features in production, oscillations and detection of the atmospheric neutrinos of low energies, E<100 MeV. The flavor ratio, r, of muon to electron neutrino fluxes is substantially smaller than 2 and decreases with energy, significant part of events is due to the decay of invisible muons at rest, etc. Oscillations in two-layer medium (atmosphere - earth) should be taken into account. We derive analytical and semi-analytical expressions for the oscillation probabilities of these "sub-subGeV" neutrinos. The energy spectra of the e-like events in water cherenkov detectors are computed and dependence of the spectra on the 2-3 mixing angle, the 1-3 mixing and CP-violation phase are studied. We find that variations of 2-3 mixing angle in the presently allowed region change the number of e-like events by about 15 - 20 % as well as to distortion of the energy spectrum. The 1-3 mixing and CP-violation can lead to ~10% effects. Detailed study of the sub-subGeV neutrinos will be possible in future Megaton-scale detectors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.5323,
  title  = {Oscillations of very low energy atmospheric neutrinos},
  author = {O. L. G. Peres and A. Yu. Smirnov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.5323},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

36 pages, 9 figures