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Development of an analysis to probe the neutrino mass ordering with atmospheric neutrinos using three years of IceCube DeepCore data IceCube Collaboration
Journal article   Open access

Development of an analysis to probe the neutrino mass ordering with atmospheric neutrinos using three years of IceCube DeepCore data IceCube Collaboration

Maryon Ahrens, Christian Bohm, Kunal Deoskar, Chad Finley, Klas Hultqvist, Erin O'Sullivan, Christian Walck and IceCube Collaboration
The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields, v 80(1)
2020
url
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7555-0View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)CC BY V4.0 Open

Abstract

Fysik Naturvetenskap Natural Sciences Physical Sciences
The Neutrino Mass Ordering (NMO) remains one of the outstanding questions in the field of neutrino physics. One strategy to measure the NMO is to observe matter effects in the oscillation pattern of atmospheric neutrinos above similar to 1GeV, as proposed for several next-generation neutrino experiments. Moreover, the existing IceCube DeepCore detector can already explore this type of measurement. We present the development and application of two independent analyses to search for the signature of the NMO with three years of DeepCore data. These analyses include a full treatment of systematic uncertainties and a statistically-rigorous method to determine the significance for the NMO from a fit to the data. Both analyses show that the dataset is fully compatible with both mass orderings. For the more sensitive analysis, we observe a preference for normal ordering with a p-value of pIO=15.3% and CLs=53.3% for the inverted ordering hypothesis, while the experimental results from both analyses are consistent within their uncertainties. Since the result is independent of the value of delta CP and obtained from energies E nu greater than or similar to 5GeV, it is complementary to recent results from long-baseline experiments. These analyses set the groundwork for the future of this measurement with more capable detectors, such as the IceCube Upgrade and the proposed PINGU detector.

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Physics, Particles & Fields
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