Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with IceCube

• Published in: Physical Review Letters
• Main Authors: Aartsen, M. G., Besson, David Zeke, IceCube Collaboration
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Physical Society 2014
• Subjects: Canada; National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs; Swedish Polar Research Secretariat
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1808/15836; https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.081801

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 and 2011. This measurement is made possible by the low-energy threshold of the DeepCore detector (∼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. The disappearance of low-energy upward-going muon neutrinos was observed, and the nonoscillation hypothesis is rejected with more than 5σ significance. In a two-neutrino flavor formalism, our data are best described by the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters |Δm232|=(2.3+0.6−0.5)×10−3 eV2 and sin2(2θ23)>0.93, and maximum mixing is favored. We acknowledge support from the following agencies: U.S. National Science Foundation—Office of Polar Programs, U.S. National Science Foundation—Physics Division, University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW) grid infrastructure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Open Science Grid (OSG) infrastructure, U.S. Department of Energy and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) grid computing resources, USA; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, WestGrid, and Compute/Calcul, Canada; Swedish Research Council, Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Sweden; German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Helmholtz Alliance for Astroparticle Physics (HAP), Research Department of Plasmas with Complex Interactions (Bochum), Germany; Fund for Scientific Research ...