Narrow Results

We present an overview of our recent investigations regarding the prospects of ongoing neutrino experiments as well as future experiments in determining few of the most important unknowns in the field of neutrino physics, specifically the neutrino mass ordering and leptonic CP-violation phase. The effect of matter oscillations on the neutrino oscillation probabilities has been exploited in resolving the degeneracy between the neutrino mass ordering and the CP violation phase in the leptonic sector. Further, we estimate the extent of extrinsic CP and CPT violation in the experiments with superbeams as well as neutrino factories.

Measurements of neutrino travel times reported last September by the OPERA collaboration have been analyzed franticly as possible evidence of superluminal propagation of a signal. Even in the likely scenario that the result ultimately does not stand up to further scrutiny, it will be worth taking notice of the few things that fundamental physics did learn in the process of studying the "OPERA anomaly".

We present an overview of our recent investigations regarding the prospects of ongoing neutrino experiments as well as future experiments in determining few of the most important unknowns in the field of neutrino physics, specifically the neutrino mass ordering and leptonic CP-violation phase. The effect of matter oscillations on the neutrino oscillation probabilities has been exploited in resolving the degeneracy between the neutrino mass ordering and the CP violation phase in the leptonic sector. Further, we estimate the extent of extrinsic CP and CPT violation in the experiments with superbeams as well as neutrino factories.

The flavor composition of ultra-high energy cosmic neutrinos (UHECN) carries precious information about the physical properties of their sources, the nature of neutrino oscillations and possible exotic physics involved during the propagation. Since UHECN with different incoming directions would propagate through different amounts of matter in Earth and since different flavors of charged leptons produced in the neutrinonucleon charged-current (CC) interaction would have different energy-loss behaviors in the medium, measurement of the angular distribution of incoming events by a neutrino observatory can in principle be employed to help determine the UHECN flavor ratio. In this paper we report on our investigation of the feasibility of such an attempt. Simulations were performed, where the detector configuration was based on the proposed Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) Observatory at the South Pole, to investigate the expected event-direction distribution for each flavor. Assuming ν_μ-ν_τ symmetry and invoking the standard oscillation and the neutrino decay scenarios, the probability distribution functions (PDF) of the event directions are utilized to extract the flavor ratio of cosmogenic neutrinos on Earth. The simulation results are summarized in terms of the probability of flavor ratio extraction and resolution as functions of the number of observed events and the angular resolution of neutrino directions. We show that it is feasible to constrain the UHECN flavor ratio using the proposed ARA Observatory.