Investigating the Neutrino Mass Ordering Problem via Ternary Plots

TL;DR

This paper uses ternary plots to analyze supernova neutrino data, aiming to distinguish between neutrino mass orderings by visualizing flavor composition evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of ternary plots to visualize neutrino flavor evolution and identify discriminants for mass ordering in supernova neutrino observations.

Findings

Normal and inverted mass orderings occupy different regions in ternary space.

Ternary plots reveal potential robust discriminants between mass orderings.

Analysis across multiple models shows consistent separation in flavor composition.

Abstract

We explore what may be deduced about the neutrino mass ordering problem from the observation of core-collapse supernova burst neutrinos in modern terrestrial detectors. We employ ternary plots in a novel way to visualize the time evolution of the flavor composition of various supernova neutrino flux models from the SNEWPY software package. Through our analysis of several models using a simplified unfolding process, we have explored potential robust discriminants between the normal and inverted mass orderings. We find that the normal and inverted mass orderings tend to occupy different regions in ternary space across different models.