Sensitivity of IceCube-Gen2 to measure flavor composition of Astrophysical neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper evaluates IceCube-Gen2's enhanced ability to determine the flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos, focusing on tau neutrino detection and flavor ratio constraints over a decade of data collection.

Contribution

It introduces a sensitivity analysis of IceCube-Gen2 for neutrino flavor identification, especially tau neutrinos, using simulated data with improved sensor technology.

Findings

IceCube-Gen2 significantly improves flavor ratio constraints.

Enhanced sensors increase tau neutrino detection capabilities.

Projected 10-year data analysis constrains astrophysical neutrino flavor composition.

Abstract

The observation of an astrophysical neutrino flux in IceCube and its detection capability to separate between the different neutrino flavors has led IceCube to constraint the flavor content of this flux. IceCube-Gen2 is the planned extension of the current IceCube detector, which will be about 8 times larger than the current instrumented volume. In this work, we study the sensitivity of IceCube-Gen2 to the astrophysical neutrino flavor composition and investigate its tau neutrino identification capabilities. We apply the IceCube analysis on a simulated IceCube-Gen2 dataset that mimics the High Energy Starting Event (HESE) classification. Reconstructions are performed using sensors that have 3 times higher quantum efficiency and isotropic angular acceptance compared to the current IceCube optical modules. We present the projected sensitivity for 10 years of data on constraining the flavor ratio of the astrophysical neutrino flux at Earth by IceCube-Gen2.