Recent progress and future prospects with atmospheric neutrinos

Abstract

The large range of energies and pathlengths spanned by atmospheric neutrinos have made them a useful tool in the discovery and subsequent study of neutrino oscillations. With the recent measurement of the θ13 mixing angle, though it is now known that all mixing angles and mass differences in the PMNSoscillation framework are non-zero, several open questions, including the nature of the neutrino mass hierarchy, the value of the θ23 octant, and whether or not neutrinos violate charge-parity symmetry, remain. As atmospheric neutrinos are capable of addressing these issues as well as those from more exotic models, the importance of their continued role in neutrino physics is clear. Accordingly, this work reviews recent progress in the study of atmospheric neutrinos, including oscillation and flux measurements from ongoing experiments, and reports on future prospects for next-generation detectors.