Decoupling supernova and neutrino oscillation physics with LAr TPC detectors

Abstract

Core collapse supernovae are a huge source of all flavor neutrinos. The flavor composition, energy spectrum and time structure of the neutrino burst from a galactic supernova can provide information about the explosion mechanism and the mechanisms of proto neutron star cooling. Such data can also give information about the intrinsic properties of the neutrino such as flavor oscillations. One important question is to understand to which extend can the supernova and the neutrino physics be decoupled in the observation of a single supernova. In this paper we discuss the possibility to probe the neutrino mixing angle \th13 and the type of mass hierarchy from the detection of supernova neutrinos with a liquid argon TPC detector. Moreover, describing the supernova neutrino emission by a set of five parameters (average energy of the different neutrino flavors, their relative luminosity and the total supernova binding energy), we quantitatively study how it is possible to constrain these parameters. A characteristic feature of the liquid argon TPC is the accessibility to four independent detection channels ((1) elastic scattering off electrons, (2) charged neutrino and (3) antineutrino and (4) neutral currents on argon nuclei) which have different sensitivities to electron-neutrino, anti-electron-neutrino and other neutrino flavors (muon and tau (anti)neutrinos). This allows to over-constrain the five supernova and the flavor mixing parameters and to some extent disentangle neutrino from supernova physics.