Search for the differences in atmospheric neutrino and antineutrino oscillation parameters at the INO-ICAL experiment

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study to measure the differences between the atmospheric neutrino and antineutrino oscillations in the Iron-Calorimeter detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory experiment. Charged-current ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ and ${\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ interactions with the detector under the influence of the Earth matter effect have been simulated for ten years of exposure. The observed ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ and ${\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ event spectra are separately binned into direction and energy bins, and a ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{2}$ is minimized with respect to each bin to extract the oscillation parameters for ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ and ${\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ separately. We then present the ICAL sensitivity to confirm a nonzero value of the difference in the atmospheric mass squared of neutrinos and antineutrinos, i.e., $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}{m}_{32}^{2}|\ensuremath{-}|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}{\overline{{m}^{2}}}_{32}|$.