Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with a High-Density Detector

TL;DR

This paper proposes a high-density detector experiment to test atmospheric neutrino oscillations, aiming to clarify the nature of neutrino flavors and measure oscillation parameters within four years.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup combining disappearance and appearance techniques using a 30 kt iron-based detector to study neutrino oscillations.

Findings

Sensitivity to oscillations with Delta m^2 > 10^-4 eV^2

Potential to distinguish sterile from tau neutrinos

Expected results within four years of data collection

Abstract

We propose an experiment to test the hypothesis that the reported anomaly on atmospheric neutrino fluxes is due to nu_mu <-> nu_x oscillations. It will rely both on a disappearance technique, exploiting the method of the dependence of the event rate on L/E, which was recently shown to be effective for detection of neutrino oscillation and measurement of the oscillation parameters, and on an appearance technique, looking for an excess of muon-less events at high energy produced by upward-going tau neutrinos. The detector will consist of iron planes interleaved by limited streamer tubes. The total mass will be about 30 kt. The possibility of recuperating most of the instrumentation from existing detectors allows to avoid R&D phases and to reduce construction time. In four years of data taking, this experiment will be sensitive to oscillations nu_mu <-> nu_x with Delta m^2 > 10^-4 eV^2 and a mixing near to maximal, and answer the question whether nu_x is a sterile or a tau neutrino.