[Seminar] Nafis Rezwan Khan Chowdhary (Universitat de València, IFIC), June 10th, 2020.

ANTARES is the largest neutrino telescope operating in the Northern Hemisphere, aiming at the
detection of high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources. However, it has an energy
threshold of few tens of GeV, thereby reaching close to the first oscillation minimum in the muon
neutrino disappearance phenomenon due to neutrino oscillations. ORCA (Oscillations Research
with Cosmics in the Abyss) is the low-energy component of KM3NeT, the next generation
underwater Cherenkov neutrino detector in the Mediterranean. Although, its primary goal is to
determine Neutrino Mass Ordering (NMO) with atmospheric neutrinos, its access to wide range
of energies and baselines makes it optimal to discover exotic physics beyond the Standard
Model (SM), such as, Non-Standard Interactions (NSI).

 

A sensitivity study of all-flavour NSI in propagation with both detectors will be presented. Due to
matter effects in earth, neutrino oscillation probabilities with non-zero NSI can be significantly be
modified over standard oscillations. It is found that, while ANTARES puts competitive limits on
NSI compared to other experimental bounds, ORCA will improve the current upper bounds on
NSI parameters by an order of magnitude, after three years of data taking. The
phenomenological aspect of possible degeneracies between NSI parameters and mass
ordering on the NMO sensitivity at ORCA will be presented. Moreover, the effect of NSI on the
joint determination of θ23 and Δm232 will also be explored.

 

Furthermore, the projected sensitivity of ORCA, for a runtime of three years, towards
disentangling the octant of θ23 will be presented.