Resolving the Mass Hierarchy with Atmospheric Neutrinos using a Liquid Argon Detector

Understand

We explore the potential offered by large-mass Liquid Argon detectors for determination of the sign of Delta m_{31}^2, or the neutrino mass hierarchy, through interactions of atmospheric neutrinos.

• We give results for a 100 kT sized magnetized detector which provides separate sensitivity to \nu_\mu, \bar{\nu}_\mu and, over a limited energy range, to \nu_e, \bar{\nu}_e.We also discuss the sensitivity for the unmagnetized version of such a detector.
• After including the effect of smearing in neutrino energy and direction and incorporating the relevant statistical,theoretical and systematic errors, we perform a binned \chi^2 analysis of simulated data.
• The \chi^2 is marginalized over the presently allowed ranges of neutrino parameters and determined as a function of \theta_{13}.