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Title: PINGU sensitivity to neutrino mass hierarchy

Journal Article · · AIP Conference Proceedings
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4902777· OSTI ID:22390645
 [1]
  1. Technische Universität München, D-85748 Garching (Germany)

Determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy (NMH) is among the most fundamental questions in particle physics. Recent measurements of 1) a large mixing angle between the first and the third neutrino mass eigenstates and 2) the first observation of atmospheric neutrino oscillations at tens of GeV with neutrino telescopes, open the intriguing new possibility to exploit matter effects in neutrino oscillation to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. A further extension of IceCube/DeepCore called PINGU (Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade) has been recently envisioned with the ultimate goal to measure neutrino mass hierarchy. PINGU would consist of additional IceCube-like strings of detectors deployed in the deepest and cleanest ice in the center of IceCube. More densely deployed instrumentation would provide a threshold substantially below 10 GeV and enhance the sensitivity to the mass hierarchy signal in atmospheric neutrinos. Here we discuss an estimate of the PINGU sensitivity to the mass hierarchy determined using an approximation with an Asimov dataset and an oscillation parameter fit.

OSTI ID:
22390645
Journal Information:
AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1630, Issue 1; Conference: VLVvT 13: 6. International Workshop on Very Large Volumte Neutrino Telescopes, Stockholm (Sweden), 5-7 Aug 2013; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English