Uncovering the neutrino mass ordering with the next galactic core-collapse supernova neutrino burst using water Cherenkov detectors

Abstract

A major challenge of particle physics is determining the neutrino mass ordering (MO). Due to matter effects, the flavor content of the neutrino flux from a Core-Collapse Supernova (CCSN) depends on the true neutrino MO resulting in markedly different energy and angle distributions for the measured lepton in water Cherenkov neutrino detectors. In this article, those distributions are compared for eight different CCSN models and used to study how their differences affect the determination of the neutrino mass ordering. In all cases, the inferred neutrino mass ordering is found to be either correct or inconclusive, with no significant false positives. However, the substantial variation observed among model predictions emphasizes the criticality of ongoing research in CCSN modeling.