Speaker: Kayla Leonard DeHolton (Penn State)
Measuring Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with IceCube
Despite neutrinos being one of the most abundant known particles in the universe, they remain an enigma within the Standard Model. The past quarter-century has seen great experimental effort in measuring the properties of neutrino oscillations. However, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, some of which can be probed through atmospheric neutrino oscillations. The IceCube DeepCore detector at the South Pole has been collecting GeV-scale atmospheric neutrino data for the past decade. In recent years, DeepCore’s measurements have improved significantly due to improvements in background rejection, reconstruction techniques, modeling of systematic uncertainties, and more. The latest DeepCore results have similar precision to accelerator-based experiments, while also providing complementarity by probing longer distance scales and higher energies. IceCube’s ability to measure oscillations will improve even further with the construction of the IceCube Upgrade in the 2025-2026 Antarctic season. The IceCube Upgrade will consist of 7 additional densely-instrumented strings with new types of modules containing multiple PMTs, greatly increasing detector performance for GeV-scale neutrinos. This talk will include recent results from IceCube DeepCore and future prospects with the IceCube Upgrade.
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