PINGU sensitivity to neutrino mass hierarchy

Abstract

Determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy (NMH) is among the most fundamental questions in particle physics. Recent measurements of 1) a large mixing angle between the first and the third neutrino mass eigenstates and 2) the first observation of atmospheric neutrino oscillations at tens of GeV with neutrino telescopes, open the intriguing new possibility to exploit matter effects in neutrino oscillation to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. A further extension of IceCube/DeepCore called PINGU (Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade) has been recently envisioned with the ultimate goal to measure neutrino mass hierarchy. PINGU would consist of additional IceCube-like strings of detectors deployed in the deepest and cleanest ice in the center of IceCube. More densely deployed instrumentation would provide a threshold substantially below 10 GeV and enhance the sensitivity to the mass hierarchy signal in atmospheric neutrinos. Here we discuss an estimate of the PINGU sensitivity to the mass hierarchy determined using an approximation with an Asimov dataset and an oscillation parameter fit.