Realistic Earth matter effects and a method to acquire information about small \theta_{13} in the detection of supernova neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates Earth matter effects on supernova neutrino detection, accounting for various physical factors, and proposes a novel method to measure very small neutrino mixing angle , surpassing current experimental sensitivities.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to determine  values below 1.5b0 using supernova neutrino data, extending beyond existing experimental capabilities.

Findings

Earth matter effects depend on incident angle, hierarchy, and supernova parameters.

A method to probe  smaller than 1.5b0 is proposed.

Sensitivity surpasses current reactor neutrino experiments.

Abstract

In this paper, we first calculate the realistic Earth matter effects in the detection of type II supernova neutrinos at the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment which is currently under construction. It is found that the Earth matter effects depend on the neutrino incident angle $\theta$, the neutrino mass hierarchy $\Delta m_{31}^{2}$, the crossing probability at the high resonance region inside the supernova, $P_{H}$, the neutrino temperature, $T_{\alpha}$, and the pinching parameter in the neutrino spectrum, $\eta_{\alpha}$. We also take into account the collective effects due to neutrino-neutrino interactions inside the supernova. With the expression for the dependence of $P_H$ on the neutrino mixing angle $\theta_{13}$, we obtain the relations between $\theta_{13}$ and the event numbers for various reaction channels of supernova neutrinos. Using these relations, we propose a possible method to acquire information about $\theta_{13}$ smaller than $1.5^\circ$. Such a sensitivity cannot yet be achieved by the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment which has a sensitivity of the order of $\theta_{13}\sim 3^\circ$. Furthermore, we apply this method to other neutrino experiments, i.e. Super-K, SNO, KamLAND, LVD, MinBooNE, Borexino, and Double-Chooz. We also study the energy spectra of the differential event numbers, ${\rm d}N/{\rm d}E$.