English

Exploring supernova neutrino mass ordering at DUNE via quantum entanglement

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-02-05 v1

Abstract

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) offers strong sensitivity to neutrinos from a Galactic core collapse supernova, providing a powerful probe of neutrino flavor conversion and the neutrino mass ordering. In this work, we study supernova neutrino oscillations at DUNE using quantum entanglement as an organizing framework. Treating the three flavor neutrino system as an effective multipartite quantum state, we quantify flavor correlations through the entanglement of formation, concurrence, and negativity, expressed directly in terms of flavor survival and transition probabilities. Benchmark scenarios defined by representative variations of the electron neutrino survival probability are constructed for each entanglement measure. Event rates and fluences are computed for a supernova at 10 kpc, and the mass ordering sensitivity is evaluated using detector-level simulations performed with the \texttt{SNOwGLoBES} framework, employing the Garching supernova flux model and including the dominant detection channels in liquid argon: νe\nu_e and νˉe\bar{\nu}_e charged-current interactions on argon and elastic scattering on electrons. We analyze both individual and combined detection channels and incorporate 5%5\% normalization and energy calibration systematic uncertainties. Our results show that DUNE achieves a 5σ5\sigma determination of the neutrino mass ordering for a supernova at distances of 20\sim 20~kpc for the νe\nu_e charged current channel and 2\sim 2~kpc for the νˉe\bar{\nu}_e channel, with the reach depending on the entanglement scenario considered. These results demonstrate that entanglement based observables provide a complementary and robust framework for probing supernova neutrino oscillations and the neutrino mass ordering.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.04800,
  title  = {Exploring supernova neutrino mass ordering at DUNE via quantum entanglement},
  author = {Adikiran Johny and Athulkrishna R and Rudra Majhi and Suchismita Sahoo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04800},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 11 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:36:22.930Z