Abstract
The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) will host a 50 kt magnetized iron calorimeter (ICAL) detector that will be able to detect muon tracks and hadron showers produced by Charged-Current muon neutrino interactions in the detector. The ICAL experiment will be able to determine the precision of atmospheric neutrino mixing parameters and neutrino mass hierarchy using atmospheric muon neutrinos through earth matter effect. In this paper, we report on the sensitivity for the atmospheric neutrino mixing parameters ($\sin^{2}\theta_{23}$ and $|\Delta m^{2}_{32}|$) for the ICAL detector using the reconstructed neutrino energy and muon direction as observables. We apply realistic resolutions and efficiencies obtained by the ICAL collaboration with a GEANT4-based simulation to reconstruct neutrino energy and muon direction. Our study shows that using neutrino energy and muon direction as observables for a $\chi^{2}$ analysis, ICAL detector can measure $\sin^{2}\theta_{23}$ and $|\Delta m^{2}_{32}|$ with 13% and 4% uncertainties at 1$\sigma$ confidence level for 10 years of exposure.
Highlights
Since the neutrino energy cannot be measured directly, in the analysis presented here, the neutrino energy is obtained by adding the energy deposited by the muons and hadron inside the iron calorimeter (ICAL) detector
The current study shows that ICAL is capable of measuring the atmospheric mixing angle sin2 θ23 with a precision of 13, 21 and 27 %, at 1σ, 2σ and 3σ confidence levels respectively
The atmospheric mass square splitting | m232| can be measured with a precision of 4, 8 and 12 % at 1 σ, 2 σ and 3 σ confidence levels respectively. These numbers show an improvement of 20 and 23 % on the precision measurement of sin2 θ23 and | m232| parameters respectively at 1σ level over muon energy and muon direction analysis [39]. These results shows that the inclusion of hadron information together with muon information significantly improves the capability of the ICAL detector for the estimation of oscillation parameters
Summary
Accumulation of more and stronger evidences of neutrino oscillations from several outstanding neutrino oscillation experiments with atmospheric [1,2,3,4,5], solar [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] and reactor [17,18,19,20] neutrinos have proven beyond any doubt that neutrinos have mass and they oscillate. Reconfirmation of atmospheric neutrino oscillations, precision measurement of oscillation parameters and the determination of neutrino mass hierarchy through the observation of earth matter effects in atmospheric neutrinos are the primary physics goals of the INO-ICAL experiment. We present the precision measurement of atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters (| m232| and sin θ23) and θ23 deviation from the maximal mixing in a 3-flavor mixing scheme through the earth matter effect for the ICAL detector at INO. Since the neutrino energy cannot be measured directly, in the analysis presented here, the neutrino energy is obtained by adding the energy deposited by the muons and hadron inside the ICAL detector We use this neutrino energy (Eν) and muon angle (cos θμ) as observables for the χ 2 estimation. A marginalised χ 2 is estimated over the allowed ranges of neutrino parameters, other than θ23 and | m232|, after including the systematic errors
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