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arXiv · 1212.2238

Exploring the Earth matter effect with atmospheric neutrinos in ice

Sanjib Kumar Agarwalla·Tracey Li·Olga Mena·Sergio Palomares-Ruiz
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Abstract

We study the possibility to perform neutrino oscillation tomography and to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy in kilometer-scale ice Cerenkov detectors by means of the theta13-driven matter effects which occur during the propagation of atmospheric neutrinos deep through the Earth. We consider the ongoing IceCube/DeepCore neutrino observatory and future planned extensions, such as the PINGU detector, which has a lower energy threshold. Our simulations include the impact of marginalization over the neutrino oscillation parameters and a fully correlated systematic uncertainty on the total number of events. For the current best-fit value of the mixing angle theta13, the DeepCore detector, due to its relatively high-energy threshold, could only be sensitive to fluctuations on the normalization of the Earth's density of \Delta\rho \simeq \pm 10% at ~ 1.6 sigma CL after 10 years in the case of a true normal hierarchy. For the two PINGU configurations we consider, overall density fluctuations of \Delta\rho \simeq \pm 3% (\pm 2%) could be measured at the 2 sigma CL after 10 years, also in the case of a normal mass hierarchy. We also compare the prospects to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy in these three configurations and find that this could be achieved at the 5 sigma CL, for both hierarchies, after 5 years in DeepCore and about 1 year in PINGU. This clearly shows the importance of lowering the energy threshold below 10 GeV so that detectors are fully sensitive to the resonant matter effects.

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Sanjib Kumar Agarwalla, Tracey Li, Olga Mena, Sergio Palomares-Ruiz. 2012-12-10. Exploring the Earth matter effect with atmospheric neutrinos in ice. https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2238

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