Parameter Degeneracy in Flavor-Dependent Reconstruction of Supernova Neutrino Fluxes

Understand

We reexamine the possibility of reconstructing the initial fluxes of supernova neutrinos emitted in a future core-collapse galactic supernova explosion and detected in a Megaton-sized water Cherenkov detector.

• A novel key element in our method is the inclusion, in addition to the total and the average energies of each neutrino species, of a "pinching" parameter characterizing the width of the distribution as a fit parameter.
• We uncover in this case a continuous degeneracy in the reconstructed parameters of supernova neutrino fluxes at the neutrinosphere.
• We analyze in detail the features of this degeneracy and show how it occurs irrespective of the parametrization used for the distribution function.