The next generation of water Cherenkov neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean Sea are under construction offshore France (KM3NeT/ORCA) and Sicily (KM3NeT/ARCA). The KM3NeT/ORCA detector features an ...energy detection threshold which allows to collect atmospheric neutrinos to study flavour oscillation. This paper reports the KM3NeT/ORCA sensitivity to this phenomenon. The event reconstruction, selection and classification are described. The sensitivity to determine the neutrino mass ordering was evaluated and found to be 4.4
σ
if the true ordering is normal and 2.3
σ
if inverted, after 3 years of data taking. The precision to measure
Δ
m
32
2
and
θ
23
were also estimated and found to be
85
.
10
-
6
eV
2
and
(
-
3.1
+
1.9
)
∘
for normal neutrino mass ordering and,
75
.
10
-
6
eV
2
and
(
-
7.0
+
2.0
)
∘
for inverted ordering. Finally, a unitarity test of the leptonic mixing matrix by measuring the rate of tau neutrinos is described. Three years of data taking were found to be sufficient to exclude
event rate variations larger than 20% at
3
σ
level.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
KM3NeT will be a network of deep-sea neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean Sea. The KM3NeT/ARCA detector, to be installed at the Capo Passero site (Italy), is optimised for the detection of ...high-energy neutrinos of cosmic origin. Thanks to its geographical location on the Northern hemisphere, KM3NeT/ARCA can observe upgoing neutrinos from most of the Galactic Plane, including the Galactic Centre. Given its effective area and excellent pointing resolution, KM3NeT/ARCA will measure or significantly constrain the neutrino flux from potential astrophysical neutrino sources. At the same time, it will test flux predictions based on gamma-ray measurements and the assumption that the gamma-ray flux is of hadronic origin. Assuming this scenario, discovery potentials and sensitivities for a selected list of Galactic sources and to generic point sources with an E−2 spectrum are presented. These spectra are assumed to be time independent. The results indicate that an observation with 3σ significance is possible in about six years of operation for the most intense sources, such as Supernovae Remnants RX J1713.7-3946 and Vela Jr. If no signal will be found during this time, the fraction of the gamma-ray flux coming from hadronic processes can be constrained to be below 50% for these two objects.
The KM3NeT research infrastructure is unconstruction in the Mediterranean Sea. KM3NeT will study atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos with two multi-purpose neutrino detectors, ARCA and ORCA, ...primarily aimed at GeV–PeV neutrinos. Thanks to the multi-photomultiplier tube design of the digital optical modules, KM3NeT is capable of detecting the neutrino burst from a Galactic or near-Galactic core-collapse supernova. This potential is already exploitable with the first detection units deployed in the sea. This paper describes the real-time implementation of the supernova neutrino search, operating on the two KM3NeT detectors since the first months of 2019. A quasi-online astronomy analysis is introduced to study the time profile of the detected neutrinos for especially significant events. The mechanism of generation and distribution of alerts, as well as the integration into the SNEWS and SNEWS 2.0 global alert systems, are described. The approach for the follow-up of external alerts with a search for a neutrino excess in the archival data is defined. Finally, an overview of the current detector capabilities and a report after the first two years of operation are given.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A
bstract
KM3NeT/ORCA is a next-generation neutrino telescope optimised for atmospheric neutrino oscillations studies. In this paper, the sensitivity of ORCA to the presence of a light sterile ...neutrino in a 3+1 model is presented. After three years of data taking, ORCA will be able to probe the active-sterile mixing angles
θ
14
,
θ
24
,
θ
34
and the effective angle
θ
μe
, over a broad range of mass squared difference
∆
m
41
2
∼ 10
−
5
,
10 eV
2
, allowing to test the eV-mass sterile neutrino hypothesis as the origin of short baseline anomalies, as well as probing the hypothesis of a very light sterile neutrino, not yet constrained by cosmology. ORCA will be able to explore a relevant fraction of the parameter space not yet reached by present measurements.
A
bstract
Studying atmospheric neutrino oscillations in the few-GeV range with a multi-megaton detector promises to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. This is the main science goal pursued by the ...future KM3NeT/ORCA water Cherenkov detector in the Mediterranean Sea. In this paper, the processes that limit the obtainable resolution in both energy and direction in charged-current neutrino events in the ORCA detector are investigated. These processes include the composition of the hadronic fragmentation products, the subsequent particle propagation and the photon-sampling fraction of the detector. GEANT simulations of neutrino interactions in seawater produced by GENIE are used to study the effects in the 1-20 GeV range. It is found that fluctuations in the hadronic cascade in conjunction with the variation of the inelasticity
y
are most detrimental to the resolutions. The effect of limited photon sampling in the detector is of significantly less importance. These results will therefore also be applicable to similar detectors/media, such as those in ice.
Abstract The KM3NeT neutrino telescope is currently being deployed at two different sites in the Mediterranean Sea. First searches for astrophysical neutrinos have been performed using data taken ...with the partial detector configuration already in operation. The paper presents the results of two independent searches for neutrinos from compact binary mergers detected during the third observing run of the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave interferometers. The first search looks for a global increase in the detector counting rates that could be associated with inverse beta decay events generated by MeV-scale electron anti-neutrinos. The second one focuses on upgoing track-like events mainly induced by muon (anti-)neutrinos in the GeV–TeV energy range. Both searches yield no significant excess for the sources in the gravitational wave catalogs. For each source, upper limits on the neutrino flux and on the total energy emitted in neutrinos in the respective energy ranges have been set. Stacking analyses of binary black hole mergers and neutron star-black hole mergers have also been performed to constrain the characteristic neutrino emission from these categories.
A recent analysis of the Fermi Large Area Telescope data provided evidence for a high-intensity emission of high-energy gamma rays with a E−2 spectrum from two large areas, spanning 50° above and ...below the Galactic centre (the “Fermi bubbles”). A hadronic mechanism was proposed for this gamma-ray emission making the Fermi bubbles promising source candidates of high-energy neutrino emission. In this work Monte Carlo simulations regarding the detectability of high-energy neutrinos from the Fermi bubbles with the future multi-km3 neutrino telescope KM3NeT in the Mediterranean Sea are presented. Under the hypothesis that the gamma-ray emission is completely due to hadronic processes, the results indicate that neutrinos from the bubbles could be discovered in about one year of operation, for a neutrino spectrum with a cutoff at 100TeV and a detector with about 6km3 of instrumented volume. The effect of a possible lower cutoff is also considered.
The successes of the ANTARES detector have demonstrated the feasibility and value of deep sea neutrino telescopes, as well as their versatility through Earth and Sea sciences. KM3NeT is a distributed ...undersea research infrastructure in the Mediterranean Sea that will host a network of next-generation neutrino telescopes. With the ORCA telescope at the KM3NeT-Fr site, the main objective is to determine the neutrinos mass hierarchy by studying atmospheric neutrino oscillations. The ARCA telescope at the KM3NeT-It site will allow for high energy neutrino astronomy. The telescopes consist of a regular 3D array of Digital Optical Modules, each composed of 31 photomultipliers, equally spaced along flexible lines anchored on the seabed. This multi-photomultipliers concept yields a factor three increase in photocathode area, compared to a design with a single 10 inch photomultiplier, leading to a significant cost reduction. Moreover, this concept allows for an accurate measurement of the light intensity and offers directional information with an almost isotropic field of view. A detailed overview of the detectors, their construction status and their physics program will be presented. The calibration techniques will be discussed, with an emphasis on time calibration, water properties and positioning measurements.
Abstract
KM3NeT4RR is a project for the Kilometre Cube Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), which is a
large European research infrastructure composed of two underwater large-scale neutrino telescopes,
ARCA ...and ORCA, located in the Mediterranean Sea off-shore Portopalo di Capo Passero (Sicily,
Italy) and Toulon (Provence, France) respectively. The telescopes are mainly designed for studying
cosmic neutrinos and neutrino properties, but the observatory infrastructure also offers
opportunity for geological and marine sciences research, providing instrumentation connections for
long-term, high-bandwidth and continuous data collection. The KM3NeT4RR project, led by the
Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, has started at the end of 2022 and during the
following 30 months it includes a set of activities aimed at extending the ARCA seafloor network
and the Italian on-shore facilities, building and operating an additional significant number of
detection elements, thus significantly advancing the final completion of the infrastructure.
Within this project, the KM3NeT laboratories present at the INFN-Bologna section are going to be
expanded and a new setup will be created that will serve for both the detectors calibration
studies and for deep-sea environmental research.
The Cherenkov Telescope Array and the KM3NeT neutrino telescopes are major upcoming facilities in the fields of
γ
-ray and neutrino astronomy, respectively. Possible simultaneous production of
γ
rays ...and neutrinos in astrophysical accelerators of cosmic-ray nuclei motivates a combination of their data. We assess the potential of a combined analysis of CTA and KM3NeT data to determine the contribution of hadronic emission processes in known Galactic
γ
-ray emitters, comparing this result to the cases of two separate analyses. In doing so, we demonstrate the capability of
Gammapy
, an open-source software package for the analysis of
γ
-ray data, to also process data from neutrino telescopes. For a selection of prototypical
γ
-ray sources within our Galaxy, we obtain models for primary proton and electron spectra in the hadronic and leptonic emission scenario, respectively, by fitting published
γ
-ray spectra. Using these models and instrument response functions for both detectors, we employ the
Gammapy
package to generate pseudo data sets, where we assume 200 h of CTA observations and 10 years of KM3NeT detector operation. We then apply a three-dimensional binned likelihood analysis to these data sets, separately for each instrument and jointly for both. We find that the largest benefit of the combined analysis lies in the possibility of a consistent modelling of the
γ
-ray and neutrino emission. Assuming a purely leptonic scenario as input, we obtain, for the most favourable source, an average expected 68% credible interval that constrains the contribution of hadronic processes to the observed
γ
-ray emission to below 15%.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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