ORCA (Oscillations Research with Cosmics in the Abyss) is the low-energy node of KM3NeT, the next generation underwater Cherenkov neutrino detector in the Mediterranean sea. The primary goal of KM3NeT-ORCA is the determination of the neutrino mass ordering (NMO). With an energy threshold of few GeV and an effective mass of several Mtons, KM3NeT-ORCA can also make precision measurements of atmospheric oscillation parameters. Moreover, its access to a wide range of energies and baselines makes it optimal to discover exotic physics beyond the Standard Model such as Non-Standard Interactions (NSI) of neutrinos. The sensitivity of the detector to the neutrino mass ordering is presented, along with its potential for determination of the atmospheric oscillation parameters. It is observed that KM3NeT-ORCA will improve the current upper limits on NSI parameters by an order of magnitude after three years of data taking.
We present the prospects of ORCA searches for new physics phenomena using atmospheric neutrinos. Focus is given to exploiting the impact of strong matter effects on the oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos in light of expanded models, such as sterile neutrinos and non-standard interactions. In the presence of light sterile neutrinos that mix with active neutrinos, additional resonances and suppressions may occur at different energies. One may also use neutrino oscillations to probe the properties of the coherent forward scattering which may be altered by new interactions beyond the Standard Mo…
Non-standard interactions (NSIs) in the propagation of neutrinos in matter can lead to significant deviations in neutrino oscillations expected within the standard 3-neutrino framework. These additional interactions would result in an anomalous flux of neutrinos observable at neutrino telescopes. The ANTARES detector and its next-generation successor, KM3NeT, located in the abyss of the Mediterranean Sea, have the potential to measure sub-dominant effects in neutrino oscillations, coming from non-standard neutrino interactions. In this contribution, a likelihood-based search for NSIs with 10 y…
The discrimination of the two possible options for the neutrino mass ordering (normal or inverted) is a major goal for current and future neutrino oscillation experiments. Such goal might be reached by observing high-statistics energy-angle spectra of events induced by atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos propagating in the Earth matter. Large volume water-Cherenkov detectors envisaged to this purpose include the so-called KM3NeT-ORCA project (in seawater) and the IceCube-PINGU project (in ice). Building upon a previous work focused on PINGU, we study in detail the effects of various system…
Several theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model consider that neutrinos can decay. In this work we assume that the standard mechanism of neutrino oscillations is altered by the decay of the heaviest neutrino mass state into a sterile neutrino and, depending on the model, a scalar or a Majoron. We study the sensitivity of the forthcoming KM3NeT-ORCA experiment to this scenario and find that it could improve the current bounds coming from oscillation experiments, where three-neutrino oscillations have been considered, by roughly two orders of magnitude. We also study how the prese…
Multi-megaton scale under ice and underwater detectors of atmospheric neutrinos with few GeV's energy threshold (PINGU, ORCA) open up new possibilities in the determination of neutrino properties, and in particular the neutrino mass hierarchy. With a dense array of optical modules it will be possible to determine the inelasticity, $y$, of the charged current $ν_μ$ events in addition to the neutrino energy $E_ν$ and the muon zenith angle $θ_μ$. The discovery potential of the detectors will substantially increase with the measurement of $y$. It will enable (i) a partial separation of the neutrin…
KM3NeT-ORCA is a water-Cherenkov neutrino detector designed for studying the oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, with the primary objective of measuring the neutrino mass ordering. Atmospheric neutrinos crossing the Earth undergo matter effects, modifying the pattern of their flavour oscillations. The study of the angular and energy distribution of neutrino events in ORCA can therefore provide tomographic information on the Earth's interior with an independent technique, complementary to the standard geophysics methods. Preliminary estimations based on a full Monte Carlo simulation of the d…
Studying the atmospheric neutrino oscillation probabilities below 2 GeV with a multi-megaton Cherenkov detector allows for a measurement of the leptonic CP-phase $δ_{CP}$. The most relevant CP-sensitive energy range is below the neutrino detection threshold of KM3NeT/ORCA, which is an underwater Cherenkov detector optimised to determine the neutrino mass ordering by measuring the oscillation pattern of 3-30 GeV atmospheric neutrinos. With Super-ORCA, a $\sim 10$ times more-densely instrumented version of ORCA, the detection threshold can be lowered and the event reconstruction capabilities imp…
A next-generation neutrino telescope infrastructure, the Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope KM3NeT, is currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea. Its low energy configuration ORCA is optimised for the detection of atmospheric neutrinos with energies above ~1 GeV. The main goal of the ORCA detector is the precise measurement of atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters and the determination of the neutrino mass ordering. The detector is also sensitive to a variety of other physics topics, such as dark matter, non-standard interactions and sterile neutrinos. An overview is presented…
KM3NeT, currently under construction in the abysses of the Mediterranean Sea, is a distributed research infrastructure that will host a km3-scale neutrino telescope (ARCA) for high-energy neutrino astronomy, and a megaton scale detector (ORCA) for neutrino oscillation studies of atmospheric neutrinos. ORCA is optimised for a measurement of the mass hierarchy, providing a sensitivity of 3σ after 3-4 years. It will also measure the atmospheric mixing parameters $Δm_{32}^2$ and $θ_{23}$ with a precision comparable to the NOvA and T2K experiments using both the muon neutrino disappearance and tau …
It has recently been suggested that the neutrino mass hierarchy can be experimentally determined from the oscillation pattern of atmospheric neutrinos passing through the Earth by measuring the two-dimensional arrival pattern of neutrinos in energy and zenith angle, in the energy regime of about 3-20 GeV. ORCA (Oscillation Research with Cosmics in the Abyss) is a study addressing the feasibility of such a measurement employing the deep-sea neutrino telescope technology developed for the KM3NeT project. In the following, the underlying physics and resulting experimental signatures will be discu…
KM3NeT is a new generation neutrino telescope currently under construction at two sites in the Mediterranean Sea. At the Capo Passero site, 100 km off-shore Sicily, Italy, a volume of more than one cubic kilometre of water will be instrumented with optical sensors. This instrument, called ARCA, is optimized for observing cosmic sources of TeV and PeV neutrinos. The other site, 40 km off-shore Toulon, France, will host a much denser array of optical sensors, ORCA. With an energy threshold of a few GeV, ORCA will be capable to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy through precision measurements …
The Protvino accelerator facility located in the Moscow region, Russia, is in a good position to offer a rich experimental research program in the field of neutrino physics. Of particular interest is the possibility to direct a neutrino beam from Protvino towards the KM3NeT/ORCA detector, which is currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea 40 km offshore Toulon, France. This proposal is known as P2O. Thanks to its baseline of 2595 km, this experiment would yield an unparalleled sensitivity to matter effects in the Earth, allowing for the determination of the neutrino mass ordering w…
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 $Δm^2_{41} \sim [10^{-5}, 10]$ $\rm{eV}^2$, allowing to test the eV-mass sterile neutrino hypothesis as the origin of short baseline anomalies, as well as probing the hypothesi…
KM3NeT is a deep-sea infrastructure composed of two neutrino telescopes being deployed in the Mediterranean Sea: ARCA, near Sicily in Italy, designed for neutrino astronomy, and ORCA, near Toulon in France, designed for neutrino oscillation physics. To achieve the best performance, the exact location of the optical modules, affected by sea current, must be known at any time and the timing resolution between optical modules must reach the nanosecond. Moreover, the properties of the environment in which the telescopes are deployed must be continuously monitored because they affect the timing and…
We examine scenarios in which a dark sector (dark matter, dark radiation, or dark energy) couples to the active neutrinos. For light and weakly-coupled exotic sectors we find that scalar, vector, or tensor dark backgrounds may appreciably impact neutrino propagation while remaining practically invisible to all other phenomenological probes. The dark medium may induce small departures from the Standard Model predictions or even offer an alternative explanation of neutrino oscillations. While the propagation of neutrinos is affected in all experiments, atmospheric data currently represent the mo…
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 thre…
We show the prospects of probing neutral-current non-standard interaction (NSI) in the propagation of atmospheric neutrinos in future large-volume neutrino experiments including DUNE, HK, KNO, and ORCA. For DUNE, we utilize its ability of identifying the tau neutrino event and combine the $ν_τ$ appearance with the $ν_μ$ disappearance. Based on our simulated results, the ten years of data taking of the atmospheric neutrinos can enormously improve the bounds on the NSI parameters $\varepsilon_{μτ}, | \varepsilon_{μμ} - \varepsilon_{ττ} |$, $\varepsilon_{e μ}$, $\varepsilon_{e τ}$ and $| \varepsi…
Studying atmospheric neutrino oscillations in the few-GeV range with a multimegaton 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 …
The KM3NeT Collaboration is constructing two deep-sea Cherenkov detectors in the Mediterranean Sea. The ARCA detector aims at TeV-PeV neutrino astronomy, while the ORCA detector is optimised for atmospheric neutrino oscillation studies at energies of a few GeV. In this contribution, an analysis of the data collected with the first deployed detection units of the ARCA detector is presented. A high-purity sample of atmospheric neutrinos is selected demonstrating the capability of the ARCA detector.
The KM3NeT research infrastructure is currently under construction at two locations in the Mediterranean Sea. The KM3NeT/ORCA water-Cherenkov neutrino detector off the French coast will instrument several megatons of seawater with photosensors. Its main objective is the determination of the neutrino mass ordering. This work aims at demonstrating the general applicability of deep convolutional neural networks to neutrino telescopes, using simulated datasets for the KM3NeT/ORCA detector as an example. To this end, the networks are employed to achieve reconstruction and classification tasks that …
Recent neutrino oscillation results have evoked renewed interest in sterile neutrino oscillation models. This paper reviews the data from MiniBooNE and short-baseline reactor antineutrino experiments within the context of sterile neutrinos. The results are incorporated into combined fits to test the viability of sterile neutrino oscillation models, which are later expanded to address matter effects. Finally, future experiments that can resolve the questions that have been raised are discussed.
Modern proposed atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments, such as PINGU in the Antarctic ice or ORCA in Mediterranean sea water, aim for precision measurements of the oscillation parameters including the ordering of the neutrino masses. They can, however, go far beyond that: Since neutrino oscillations are affected by the coherent forward scattering with matter, neutrinos can provide a new view on the interior of the earth. We show that the proposed atmospheric oscillation experiments can measure the lower mantle density of the earth with a precision at the level of a few percent, includin…
One of the basic propositions of quantum field theory is Lorentz invariance. The spontaneous breaking of Lorentz symmetry at a high energy scale can be studied at low energy extensions like the Standard model in a model-independent way through effective field theory (EFT). The present and future Long-baseline neutrino experiments can give a scope to observe such a Planck-suppressed physics of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). A proposed long baseline experiment, Protvino to ORCA (dubbed "P2O") with a baseline of 2595 km, is expected to provide good sensitivities to unresolved issues, especia…
Neutrino oscillation results from several experiments and sources are discussed. Recent results from solar neutrino measurements by Super-Kamiokande and Borexino, atmospheric neutrino measurements from Super-Kamiokande, and accelerator neutrino measurements by MINOS and OPERA are the main topics of this document.
This is the report from the Snowmass NF01 topical group and colleagues on the current status and expected future progress to understand the three-flavor neutrino oscillation picture.
The bicycle model of Lorentz noninvariant neutrino oscillations without neutrino masses naturally predicts maximal mixing and a 1/E dependence of the oscillation argument for muon-neutrino to tau-neutrino oscillations of atmospheric and long-baseline neutrinos, but cannot also simultaneously fit the data for solar neutrinos and KamLAND. Within the Standard Model Extension, we examine all 19 possible structures of the effective Hamiltonian for Lorentz noninvariant oscillations of massless neutrinos that naturally have a 1/E dependence at high neutrino energy. Due to the lack of any evidence for…
A virtual graphical construction is made to show the difference between neutrino and anti-neutrino oscillations in the presence of CP violation with CPT conservation.
Search for an eV-scale sterile neutrino with the first six detection units of KM3NeT/ORCA
Università di Firenze（佛罗伦萨大学）；INFN, Sezione di Firenze（意大利国家核物理研究所佛罗伦萨分部）；Université de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；CNRS, IPHC UMR 7178（法国国家科学研究中心高能物理研究所）；Université de Haute Alsace（上阿尔萨斯大学）；Khalifa University of Science and Technology（哈利法科学技术大学）；Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM（艾克斯-马赛大学，法国国家科学研究中心/欧洲粒子物理研究所，粒子物理中心）；IFIC - Instituto de Física Corpuscular (CSIC - Universitat de València)（基本粒子物理研究所（瓦伦西亚大学与西班牙高等科学研究理事会））；INFN, Sezione di Roma（意大利国家核物理研究所罗马分部）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Subatech, IMT Atlantique, IN2P3-CNRS, Nantes Université（南特大学亚原子物理与技术实验室，大西洋理工学院，法国国家科学研究中心/欧洲粒子物理研究所）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）
Neutrino oscillations have been probed during the last few decades using multiple neutrino sources and experimental set-ups. In the recent years, very large volume neutrino telescopes have started contributing to the field. First ANTARES and then IceCube have relied on large and sparsely instrumented volumes to observe atmospheric neutrinos for combinations of baselines and energies inaccessible to other experiments. Using this advantage, the latest result from IceCube starts approaching the precision of other established technologies, and is paving the way for future detectors, such as ORCA a…
The Nobel prize in physics 2015 has been awarded "... for the discovery of neutrino oscillations which show that neutrinos have mass". While SuperKamiokande (SK), indeed, has discovered oscillations, SNO observed effect of the adiabatic (almost non-oscillatory) flavor conversion of neutrinos in the matter of the Sun. Oscillations are irrelevant for solar neutrinos apart from small $ν_e$ regeneration inside the Earth. Both oscillations and adiabatic conversion do not imply masses uniquely and further studies were required to show that non-zero neutrino masses are behind the SNO results. Phenome…
We study neutrino oscillations in a medium of dark matter which generalizes the standard matter effect. A general formula is derived to describe the effect of various mediums and their mediators to neutrinos. Neutrinos and anti-neutrinos receive opposite contributions from asymmetric distribution of (dark) matter and anti-matter, and thus it could appear in precision measurement of neutrino or anti-neutrino oscillations. Furthermore, the standard neutrino oscillation can occur from the symmetric dark matter effect even for massless neutrinos.
A brief overview of selected topics in the theory and phenomenology of neutrino oscillations is given. These include: oscillations in vacuum and in matter; phenomenology of 3-flavour neutrino oscillations and effective 2-flavour approximations; CP and T violation in neutrino oscillations in vacuum and in matter; matter effects on ν_μ\leftrightarrow ν_τoscillations; parametric resonance in neutrino oscillations inside the earth; oscillations below and above the MSW resonance; unsettled issues in the theory of neutrino oscillations.
KM3NeT is a research infrastructure in construction under the Mediterranean Sea. It hosts two large volume neutrino Cherenkov telescopes: ARCA at a depth of 3500 m, located offshore Sicily, and ORCA, 2500 m under the sea level, offshore the southern French coast. The two detectors share the same detection principle and technology and the same data acquisition design, the only difference being the geometrical arrangement of the optical sensors. This allows to span a wide range of neutrino energy and cover a large scientific program: the study of neutrino properties, first of all neutrino mass o…
We show that, despite appearances, a theoretical approach to neutrino oscillation in which the neutrino and its interaction partners are entangled yields the standard result for the neutrino oscillation wavelength. We also shed some light on the question of why plane-wave approaches to the neutrino oscillation problem can yield the correct oscillation wavelength even though they do not explicitly account for the localization of the neutrino source and the detector.
The KM3NeT Collaboration has successfully deployed its first detection units in the Mediterranean Sea in December 2015 (ARCA) and September 2017 (ORCA). The sample of data collected between September 2016 and March 2017 has been used to measure the atmospheric muon flux at two different depths under the sea level: about 3.5\,km with ARCA and about 2.5\,km with ORCA. The atmospheric muon flux represents an abundant signal for a neutrino telescope and can be used to test the reliability of the Monte Carlo simulation chain. In this work, the measurements are compared to Monte Carlo simulations ba…
