Abstract
KM3NeT, currently under construction in the abysses of the Mediterranean Sea, is a distributed research infrastructure that will host a km3-scale neutrino telescope (ARCA) for high-energy neutrino astronomy, and a megaton scale detector (ORCA) for neutrino oscillation studies of atmospheric neutrinos. ORCA is optimised for a measurement of the mass hierarchy, providing a sensitivity of 3σ after 3-4 years. It will also measure the atmospheric mixing parameters Δm2atm and θ23 with a precision comparable to the NOvA and T2K experiments using both the muon neutrino disappearance and tau neutrino appearance channels. It will provide a measurement of the tau neutrino appearance rate with better than 10% precision, a crucial ingredient for tests of unitarity. It will probe the octant of the mixing angle θ23 via matter resonance effects on neutrinos and antineutrinos crossing the core and mantle, which are largely independent on the CP phase. The observation of neutrino oscillations over a wide range of baselines and energies will provide broad sensitivity to new physics such as non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) and sterile neutrinos.
Highlights
The search for an understanding of the fundamental behaviour of neutrinos has been at the cutting edge of scientific research for the last sixty years
A variety of experiments with solar, atmospheric, reactor and accelerator neutrinos, spanning energies from the MeV up to tens of GeVs, have provided compelling evidence that the known flavour eigenstates mix, implying the existence of nonzero neutrino masses; one of the few experimental evidence hinting towards physics beyond the Standard Model
The matter effects arise from the νe component of the ‘beam’ undergoing charged-current elastic scattering interactions with the electrons in the matter. This effectively modifies the observed mixing angles and mass differences in a way that depends on the neutrino mass hierarchy (NMH) [5]
Summary
The search for an understanding of the fundamental behaviour of neutrinos has been at the cutting edge of scientific research for the last sixty years. Atmospheric neutrinos, produced in cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere, provide an unprecedented range of energies (MeV to TeV) and baselines (50 km to 12700 km), not accessible to accelerator and reactor experiments Generation experiments such as KM3NeT-ORCA [1], PINGU [2], Hyper-Kamiokande [3] are planned to exploit these features with very large volume neutrino detectors over the decade. The matter effects arise from the νe component of the ‘beam’ undergoing charged-current elastic scattering interactions with the electrons in the matter This effectively modifies the observed mixing angles and mass differences in a way that depends on the NMH [5]. Unlike the case of T2K and NOνA, the measurement is essentially insensitive to the assumed CP phase
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