Abstract
Studying atmospheric neutrino oscillations in the few-GeV range with a multi-megaton detector promises to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. This is the main science goal pursued by the future KM3NeT/ORCA water Cherenkov detector in the Mediterranean Sea. In this paper, the processes that limit the obtainable resolution in both energy and direction in charged-current neutrino events in the ORCA detector are investigated. These processes include the composition of the hadronic fragmentation products, the subsequent particle propagation and the photon-sampling fraction of the detector. GEANT simulations of neutrino interactions in seawater produced by GENIE are used to study the effects in the 1-20 GeV range. It is found that fluctuations in the hadronic cascade in conjunction with the variation of the inelasticity y are most detrimental to the resolutions. The effect of limited photon sampling in the detector is of significantly less importance. These results will therefore also be applicable to similar detectors/media, such as those in ice.
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The KM3NeT collaboration., Adrián-Martínez, S., Ageron, M. et al. Intrinsic limits on resolutions in muon- and electron-neutrino charged-current events in the KM3NeT/ORCA detector. J. High Energ. Phys. 2017, 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2017)008
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2017)008