Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with IceCube

preprint2013arXivOpen access

Abstract

We present the first statistically significant detection of neutrino oscillations in the high-energy regime (>> 20 GeV) from an analysis of IceCube Neutrino Observatory data collected in 2010-2011. This measurement is made possible by the low energy threshold of the DeepCore detector (∼20\sim 20 GeV) and benefits from the use of the IceCube detector as a veto against cosmic ray-induced muon background. The oscillation signal was detected within a low-energy muon neutrino sample (20 -- 100 GeV) extracted from data collected by DeepCore. A high-energy muon neutrino sample (100 GeV -- 10 TeV) was extracted from IceCube data to constrain systematic uncertainties. Disappearance of low-energy upward-going muon neutrinos was observed, and the non-oscillation hypothesis is rejected with more than 5σ5σ significance. In a two-neutrino flavor formalism, our data are best described by the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters Δm232=(2.3−0.5+0.6)⋅10−3Δm^2_{23}= (2.3^{+0.6}_{-0.5})\cdot 10^{-3} eV2^2 and sin⁡2(2θ23)>0.93\sin^2(2 θ_{23})>0.93, and maximum mixing is favored.

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