NMH Neutrino Mass Hierarchy

Introduction

Liam Quinn continued to work on the NMH (Neutrino Mass Hierarchy) software package. This package enables evaluation of the sensitivity of a generic neutrino telescope to the neutrino mass hierarchy using atmospheric neutrinos. As input it takes parametrisations of the angular and direction resolutions as a function of energy for the track/shower channels as well as the track/shower particle identification performance.

Examples

The package was used to calculate the capability of the KM3NeT/ORCA neutrino telescope for the neutrino mass hierarchy determination. These results were presented in a poster at the Neutrino 2018 conference in July 2018. Subsequently, the package was extended to incorporate an arbitrary number of particle id classes and was demonstrated to improve the sensitivity beyond that achieved with the nominal two classes. Liam Quinn, successfully defended his thesis on 9 Nov, 2018, the studies presented there were based on the JGANDALF track reconstruction and the NMH packages developed within ASTERICS. Both the JGANDALF and NMH package are available on the ASTERICS software repository.

Vladimir Zaborov adapted the NMH package to handle the case of a neutrino beam (rather than atmospheric neutrinos). The results of this study formed part of the basis of the Protvino to ORCA Letter of Interest.