Neutrino mass hierarchy and octant determination with atmospheric neutrinos

Abstract

The recent discovery by the Daya-Bay and RENO experiments, that θ_{13} is nonzero and relatively large, significantly impacts existing experiments and the planning of future facilities. In many scenarios, the nonzero value of θ_{13} implies that θ_{23} is likely to be different from π/4. Additionally, large detectors will be sensitive to matter effects on the oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, making it possible to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy and the octant of θ_{23}. We show that a 50 kT magnetized liquid argon neutrino detector can ascertain the mass hierarchy with a significance larger than 4 sigma with moderate exposure times, and the octant at the level of 2-3 sigma with greater exposure.

4 pages, 4 figures. Version published in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (5)

• Observation of electron-antineutrino disappearance at Daya Bay
• Indication of Electron Neutrino Appearance from an Accelerator-produced Off-axis Muon Neutrino Beam
• Mass Hierarchy Determination via future Atmospheric Neutrino Detectors
• LANNDD - A line of liquid argon TPC detectors scalable in mass from 200 Tons to 100 Ktons
• Resolving the Mass Hierarchy with Atmospheric Neutrinos using a Liquid Argon Detector

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Mass hierarchy, 2-3 mixing and CP-phase with Huge Atmospheric Neutrino Detectors
• Systematic uncertainties in long-baseline neutrino oscillations for large ${\theta }_{13}$
• Enhancing sensitivity to neutrino parameters at INO combining muon and hadron information
• Probing Neutrino Oscillation Parameters using High Power Superbeam from ESS
• Exploring the Earth matter effect with atmospheric neutrinos in ice
• Determining the Octant of ${\theta }_{23}$ at LBNE in conjunction with Reactor Experiments
• Majorana neutrino mass matrices with three texture zeros and the sterile neutrino
• Revisiting the sensitivity studies for leptonic CP violation and mass hierarchy with T2K, NOvA and LBNE experiments