Realistic Earth matter effects and a method to acquire information about small θ_{13} in the detection of supernova neutrinos

Abstract

In this paper, we first calculate the realistic Earth matter effects in the detection of type II supernova neutrinos at the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment which is currently under construction. It is found that the Earth matter effects depend on the neutrino incident angle $θ$, the neutrino mass hierarchy $Δm_{31}^{2}$, the crossing probability at the high resonance region inside the supernova, $P_{H}$, the neutrino temperature, $T_α$, and the pinching parameter in the neutrino spectrum, $η_α$. We also take into account the collective effects due to neutrino-neutrino interactions inside the supernova. With the expression for the dependence of $P_H$ on the neutrino mixing angle $θ_{13}$, we obtain the relations between $θ_{13}$ and the event numbers for various reaction channels of supernova neutrinos. Using these relations, we propose a possible method to acquire information about $θ_{13}$ smaller than $1.5^\circ$. Such a sensitivity cannot yet be achieved by the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment which has a sensitivity of the order of $θ_{13}\sim 3^\circ$. Furthermore, we apply this method to other neutrino experiments, i.e. Super-K, SNO, KamLAND, LVD, MinBooNE, Borexino, and Double-Chooz. We also study the energy spectra of the differential event numbers, ${\rm d}N/{\rm d}E$.