Enhancing sensitivity to neutrino parameters at INO combining muon and hadron information

Abstract

The proposed ICAL experiment at INO aims to identify the neutrino mass hierarchy from observations of atmospheric neutrinos, and help improve the precision on the atmospheric neutrino mixing parameters. While the design of ICAL is primarily optimized to measure muon momentum, it is also capable of measuring the hadron energy in each event. Although the hadron energy is measured with relatively lower resolution, it nevertheless contains crucial information on the event, which may be extracted when taken concomitant with the muon data. We demonstrate that by adding the hadron energy information to the muon energy and muon direction in each event, the sensitivity of ICAL to the neutrino parameters can be improved significantly. Using the realistic detector response for ICAL, we present its enhanced reach for determining the neutrino mass hierarchy, the atmospheric mass squared difference and the mixing angle theta23, including its octant. In particular, we show that the analysis that uses hadron energy information can distinguish the normal and inverted mass hierarchies with Deltachi^2 approx 9 with 10 years exposure at the 50 kt ICAL, which corresponds to about 40% improvement over the muon-only analysis.

25 pages, 26 pdf figures, 3 tables. Comments are welcome. One new table (Table 3). New references added. Some parts of the text rewritten to improve the discussion. Matches with published version

References in corpus (8)

• Global fit to three neutrino mixing: critical look at present precision
• Possible Alternatives to Tri-bimaximal Mixing
• Large underground, liquid based detectors for astro-particle physics in Europe: scientific case and prospects
• Mass hierarchy, 2-3 mixing and CP-phase with Huge Atmospheric Neutrino Detectors
• Potential of optimized NOvA for large theta(13) & combined performance with a LArTPC & T2K
• Neutrino mass hierarchy and octant determination with atmospheric neutrinos
• A Simulations Study of the Muon Response of the Iron Calorimeter Detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory
• The mass hierarchy with atmospheric neutrinos at INO

Cited by in corpus (9)

• PINGU and the neutrino mass hierarchy: Statistical and systematic aspects
• The sensitivity of the ICAL detector at India-based Neutrino Observatory to neutrino oscillation parameters
• Locating the Core-Mantle Boundary using Oscillations of Atmospheric Neutrinos
• Probing Lorentz Invariance Violation with Atmospheric Neutrinos at INO-ICAL
• Enhancing the hierarchy and octant sensitivity of ESS$\nu$SB in conjunction with T2K, NO$\nu$A and ICAL@INO
• Impact of scalar NSI on the neutrino mass ordering sensitivity at DUNE, HK and KNO
• Comprehensive study of Lorentz invariance violation in atmospheric and long-baseline experiments
• Determining Neutrino Mass Ordering with ICAL, JUNO and T2HK
• Neutrino Oscillation parameter determination at INO-ICAL using track and hit information from GEANT