Introduction
In the 1990s, Super-Kamiokande’s measurements of atmospheric neutrinos led to the acceptance of the mass-induced oscillation model. As of today, the three mixing angles, the solar mass splitting and the absolute value of the atmospheric mass splitting that control the oscillation phenomenon have been measured. The existence of CP-violation and the ordering of the masses remain open issues. Addressing these issues requires improving the measurement precision on the known parameters and measurements sensitive to the modification of oscillation probabilities as neutrinos traverse matter.
We present a measurement of neutrino oscillations via atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance with three years of data of the completed IceCube neutrino detector. DeepCore, a region of denser instrumentation, enables the detection and reconstruction of atmospheric muon neutrinos between 10 GeV and 100 GeV, where a strong disappearance signal is expected. The detector volume surrounding DeepCore is used as a veto region to suppress the atmospheric muon background. Neutrino events are selected where the detected Cherenkov photons of the secondary particles minimally scatter, and the neutrino energy and arrival direction are reconstructed. Both variables are used to obtain the neutrino oscillation parameters from the data. The results are compatible and comparable in precision to those of dedicated oscillation experiments.
You can view the paper here: arXiv:1410.7227
As of July 2016, these results have been updated and presented at Neutrino 2016, the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics. You can download the talk here.
In February 2017, a search for sterile neutrinos using the same low-energy IceCube/DeepCore neutrino candidates was presented in a paper submitted to Physical Review D. Read the paper on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/1702.05160. This search complements a previous search for sterile neutrinos at TeV energies published by the IceCube Collaboration in August 2016 (read more about this search here).
Data release
IceCube Oscillations: 3 years muon neutrino disappearance data
Click here to download (.zip, 1.6MB)
The data being released contains the relevant information to reproduce the result presented in the paper. The information is provided in form of tables in ASCII format. Resolutions and effective areas are accompanied by figures. Please see the README file in the data download for more information.
Data release updated on October 14, 2016. Please see details about the update in the README file included in the release and in the information above.
This data release has been superseded by a subsequent release found here. For any questions about this data release, please write to data@icecube.wisc.edu.