Three-neutrino oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, image, neutrino mass hierarchy and iron magnetized detectors Original Research Article

We derive predictions for the Nadir angle (image) dependence of the ratio image of the rates of the image and image multi-GeV events, and for the image–image event rate asymmetry, image, in iron-magnetized calorimeter detectors (MINOS, INO, etc.) in the case of 3-neutrino oscillations of the atmospheric image and image, driven by one neutrino mass squared difference, image. The asymmetry image (the ratio image) is shown to be particularly sensitive to the Earth matter effects in the atmospheric neutrino oscillations, and thus to the values of image and image, image and image being the neutrino mixing angle limited by the CHOOZ and Palo Verde experiments and that responsible for the dominant atmospheric image (image) oscillations. It is also very sensitive to the type of neutrino mass spectrum which can be with normal (image) or with inverted (image) hierarchy. We find that for image, image and image, the Earth matter effects produce a relative difference between the integrated asymmetries image and image in the mantle (image) and core (image) bins, which is bigger in absolute value than approximately ∼15%, can reach the values of image, and thus can be sufficiently large to be observable. The sign of the indicated asymmetry difference is anticorrelated with the sign of image. An observation of the Earth matter effects in the Nadir angle distribution of the asymmetry image (ratio image) would clearly indicate that image and image, and would lead to the determination of the sign of image.