https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7555-0
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Development of an analysis to probe the neutrino mass ordering with atmospheric neutrinos using three years of IceCube DeepCore data
IceCube Collaboration
1
III. Physikalisches Institut, RWTH Aachen University, 52056, Aachen, Germany
2
Department of Physics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005, Australia
3
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Dr., Anchorage, AK, 99508, USA
4
Department of Physics, University of Texas at Arlington, 502 Yates St., Science Hall Rm 108, Box 19059, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA
5
CTSPS, Clark-Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA, 30314, USA
6
School of Physics and Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA
7
Department of Physics, Southern University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70813, USA
8
Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
9
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
10
Institut für Physik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 12489, Berlin, Germany
11
Fakultät für Physik & Astronomie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany
12
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Science Faculty CP230, 1050, Brussels, Belgium
13
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Dienst ELEM, 1050, Brussels, Belgium
14
Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA
15
Department of Physics and Institute for Global Prominent Research, Chiba University, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan
16
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
17
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA
18
Department of Physics and Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
19
Department of Astronomy, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
20
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2100, Copenhagen, Denmark
21
Department of Physics, TU Dortmund University, 44221, Dortmund, Germany
22
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA
23
Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E1, Canada
24
Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
25
Département de physique nucléaire et corpusculaire, Université de Genève, 1211, Geneva, Switzerland
26
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Gent, 9000, Gent, Belgium
27
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA
28
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA
29
SNOLAB, 1039 Regional Road 24, Creighton Mine 9, Lively, ON, P3Y 1N2, Canada
30
Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA
31
Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA
32
Department of Physics and Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA
33
Institute of Physics, University of Mainz, Staudinger Weg 7, 55099, Mainz, Germany
34
School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
35
Department of Physics, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 53201, USA
36
Physik-department, Technische Universität München, 85748, Garching, Germany
37
Institut für Kernphysik, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 48149, Münster, Germany
38
Bartol Research Institute and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716, USA
39
Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA
40
Department of Physics, University of Oxford, 1 Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3NP, UK
41
Department of Physics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
42
Physics Department, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD, 57701, USA
43
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, River Falls, WI, 54022, USA
44
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA
45
Oskar Klein Centre and Department of Physics, Stockholm University, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden
46
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-3800, USA
47
Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, Korea
48
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487, USA
49
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA
50
Department of Physics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA
51
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, Box 516, 75120, Uppsala, Sweden
52
Department of Physics, University of Wuppertal, 42119, Wuppertal, Germany
53
DESY, 15738, Zeuthen, Germany
* e-mail: justin.evans@manchester.ac.uk
Received:
20
February
2019
Accepted:
11
December
2019
Published online:
4
January
2020
The Neutrino Mass Ordering (NMO) remains one of the outstanding questions in the field of neutrino physics. One strategy to measure the NMO is to observe matter effects in the oscillation pattern of atmospheric neutrinos above 
, as proposed for several next-generation neutrino experiments. Moreover, the existing IceCube DeepCore detector can already explore this type of measurement. We present the development and application of two independent analyses to search for the signature of the NMO with three years of DeepCore data. These analyses include a full treatment of systematic uncertainties and a statistically-rigorous method to determine the significance for the NMO from a fit to the data. Both analyses show that the dataset is fully compatible with both mass orderings. For the more sensitive analysis, we observe a preference for normal ordering with a p-value of 
and 
for the inverted ordering hypothesis, while the experimental results from both analyses are consistent within their uncertainties. Since the result is independent of the value of 
and obtained from energies 
, it is complementary to recent results from long-baseline experiments. These analyses set the groundwork for the future of this measurement with more capable detectors, such as the IceCube Upgrade and the proposed PINGU detector.
© The Author(s), 2020
