Impact of errors in the magnetic field measurement on the precision determination of neutrino oscillation parameters at the proposed ICAL detector at INO

Abstract

The magnetised iron calorimeter (ICAL) detector proposed at the India-based Neutrino Observatory will be a 51 kton detector made of 151 layers of 56 mm thick soft iron with 40 mm air gap in between where the RPCs, the active detectors, will be placed. The main goal of ICAL is to make precision measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters, especially of the neutrino mass ordering, using the atmospheric neutrinos as source. The charged current interactions of the atmospheric muon neutrinos and anti-neutrinos in the detector produce charged muons. The magnetic field, with a maximum value of ∼ 1.5 T in the central region of ICAL, is a critical component since it will be used to distinguish the charges and determine the momentum and direction of these muons. It is difficult to measure the magnetic field inside the iron. The existing methods can only estimate the internal field and hence will be prone to error. This paper presents the first simulations study of the effect of errors in the measurement of the magnetic field in ICAL on its physics potential, especially the neutrino mass ordering and precision measurement of oscillation parameters in the 2–3 sector. The study is a GEANT4-based analysis, using measurements of the magnetic field at the prototype ICAL detector. We find that there is only a small effect on the determination of the mass ordering. While local fluctuations in the magnetic field measurement are well-tolerated, calibration errors must remain well within 5% to retain good precision determination of the parameters sin2 θ 23 and Δm 2 32.