Abstract
In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy via a high-statistics and real-time observation of supernova neutrinos with short-time characteristics. The essential idea is to utilize distinct times-of-flight for different neutrino mass eigenstates from a core-collapse supernova to the Earth, which may significantly change the time distribution of neutrino events in the future huge water-Cherenkov and liquid-scintillator detectors. For illustration, we consider two different scenarios. The first case is the neutronization burst of emitted in the first tens of milliseconds of a core-collapse supernova, while the second case is the black hole formation during the accretion phase for which neutrino signals are expected to be abruptly terminated. In the latter scenario, it turns out only when the supernova is at a distance of a few Mpc and the fiducial mass of the detector is at the level of gigaton, might we be able to discriminate between normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchies. In the former scenario, the probability for such a discrimination is even less due to a poor statistics.
Highlights
The fact that neutrinos have finite and non-degenerate masses has well been established by a number of elegant neutrino oscillation experiments [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
We show that SN neutrino emission with a characteristic time smaller than the difference in the time of flight (ToF) for different neutrino mass eigenstates can be utilized to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy (MH), if the time resolution of the future SN neutrino detector is good enough as expected
For the neutronization νe burst of core-collapse SNe, the peaks corresponding to different neutrino mass eigenstates for the neutrino mass hierarchy (NH) will appear in a temporal order different from that for the inverted neutrino mass hierarchy (IH)
Summary
The fact that neutrinos have finite and non-degenerate masses has well been established by a number of elegant neutrino oscillation experiments [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. There will be no final SN explosion, this scenario does have the advantage of an even shorter characteristic time, i.e., ∆tB ≈ 2R/c ∼ 0.1 ms, where the radius of active region for neutrino emission R ≈ 10 km and the speed of light c ≈ 3 × 1010 cm s−1 have been used At this point, we should mention that the ToF of massive neutrinos from the BH forming SNe have been considered previously by Beacom et al in Ref.
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