Measurement of atmospheric neutrino oscillations at 6-56 GeV with IceCube DeepCore

Abstract

We present a measurement of the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters using three years of data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The DeepCore infill array in the center of IceCube enables the detection and reconstruction of neutrinos produced by the interaction of cosmic rays in Earth’s atmosphere at energies as low as ∼5 GeV. That energy threshold permits measurements of muon neutrino disappearance, over a range of baselines up to the diameter of the Earth, probing the same range of L/Eν as long-baseline experiments but with substantially higher-energy neutrinos. This analysis uses neutrinos from the full sky with reconstructed energies from 5.6 to 56 GeV. We measure Δm232=2.31+0.11−0.13×10−3 eV2 and sin2θ23=0.51+0.07−0.09, assuming normal neutrino mass ordering. These results are consistent with, and of similar precision to, those from accelerator- and reactor-based experiments.