Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with Very Large Volume Neutrino Telescopes

Table 1

Qualitative comparison of experiments measuring the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters. The table is divided into detector and flux characteristics. Note that the far detector of T2K is Super-Kamiokande but uses accelerator neutrinos. Detector performances taken from [4, 9, 38, 43, 49, 83, 95]. Expected neutrino events quoted from published results of disappearance at analysis level (note that for VLVNTs this number can vary significantly depending on the studied range in energy, zenith angle, and topology). COH refers to coherent pion production. For details on the other interaction channels and energy ranges see Figure 8.

	Parameter	VLVNT		SK	MINOS, T2K, and NOvA
		ANTARES	DeepCore
Detector (far)	Instrumentation density (m^−3)	9.1 × 10^−5 OMs	2.3 × 10^−5 DOMs	0.2 OMs	15 channels
	Detection principle	Cherenkov light over tens of meters		Cherenkov rings	Trackers/calorimeters
	resolution	50% ± 22%	25% at 20 GeV	3% at 1 GeV	10–15% at 10 GeV
	resolution	3° at 20 GeV	8° at 20 GeV	2-3°	—
	Particle ID capabilities	Muon/no muon in interaction		(rings)	Individual particles, charge
Neutrino flux	Source of neutrinos	Atmosphere: mix of , and			Accelerator: modes
	Baseline	10–12700 km			300–800 km
	Flux determination	Atm. models, self-fit		+top/down ratios	Near/far detector
	Energy range	10–100 GeV		Few MeV–few GeV	Few GeV
	Main interaction channel	DIS		QE	QE, RES, COH, and DIS
	events expected with osc.	530	1800	2000	30 (T2K), 900 (MINOS)
	and without osc. (per year)	660	2300	2300	120 (T2K), 1050 (MINOS)