• S UMA SANKAR

Articles written in Pramana – Journal of Physics

• Solar neutrino problem in light of super-Kamiokande data

I discuss the status of the accepted solutions to the solar neutrino problem in light of the super-Kamiokande data.

• Three flavour oscillation interpretation of neutrino data

I consider the mixing of the three active neutrino flavours and obtain the constraints on the parameters of this mixing from the solar, atmospheric and reactor neutrino data.

• Physics possibilities at India-based Neutrino Observatory

In this talk I review the physics possible at India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO). I discuss the improvement in the precision of currently known quantities and the possibility measuring the presently unknown quantities.

• Working group report: Astroparticle and neutrino physics

The working group on astroparticle and neutrino physics at WHEPP-9 covered a wide range of topics. The main topics were neutrino physics at INO, neutrino astronomy and recent constraints on dark energy coming from cosmological observations of large scale structure and CMB anisotropy.

• Working group report: Flavor physics and model building

This is the report of flavor physics and model building working group at WHEPP-9. While activites in flavor physics have been mainly focused on B-physics, those in model building have been primarily devoted to neutrino physics. We present summary of working group discussions carried out during the workshop in the above fields, and also briefly review the progress made in some projects subsequently.

• Physics potential of the ICAL detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO)

The upcoming 50 kt magnetized iron calorimeter (ICAL) detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is designed to study the atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos separately over a wide range of energies andpath lengths. The primary focus of this experiment is to explore the Earth matter effects by observing the energy and zenith angle dependence of the atmospheric neutrinos in the multi-GeV range. This study will be crucial toaddress some of the outstanding issues in neutrino oscillation physics, including the fundamental issue of neutrino mass hierarchy. In this document, we present the physics potential of the detector as obtained from realistic detector simulations.We describe the simulation framework, the neutrino interactions in the detector, and the expected responseof the detector to particles traversing it. The ICAL detector can determine the energy and direction of the muons to a high precision, and in addition, its sensitivity to multi-GeV hadrons increases its physics reach substantially. Itscharge identification capability, and hence its ability to distinguish neutrinos from antineutrinos, makes it an efficient detector for determining the neutrino mass hierarchy. In this report, we outline the analyses carried out for the determination of neutrino mass hierarchy and precision measurements of atmospheric neutrino mixing parameters at ICAL, and give the expected physics reach of the detector with 10 years of runtime. We also explore the potential of ICAL for probing new physics scenarios like CPT violation and the presence of magnetic monopoles.

• Hadron energy estimation from atmospheric neutrino events

The iron calorimeter (ICAL) at India-based neutrino observatory (INO) is designed to mainly observe the muons produced in the charged current interactions of atmospheric muon neutrinos and antineutrinos. The track of the muon is reconstructed using the hits they produce in the detector. From this track, the charge, the energy and the direction of the muon are estimated, which are used to do oscillation physics analysis. In a large fraction of events, a number of hadrons are also produced in addition to the muons. The charged hadrons also leave hits in the detector which can be utilised to estimate the hadron energy. In this work, we generate atmospheric neutrino events using two different neutrino event generators: NUANCE and GENIE. The generated events are passed through the Geant4 simulator of ICAL. In each case, we study the relation between hadron hits, defined to be the difference between the total number of hits and the muon track hits, and the hadron energy. We find that a non-negligible number of baryons are produced in atmospheric neutrino interactions. For $E_{had}$ < 5 GeV almost all the hadron energy is carried by these baryons. Finally, we formulate a procedure by which the hadron energy can be estimated from the number of hadron hits.

• Pramana – Journal of Physics

Volume 95, 2021
All articles
Continuous Article Publishing mode

• Editorial Note on Continuous Article Publication

Posted on July 25, 2019