"1. Interaction with matter changes the neutrino mixing and effective mass splitting in a way that depends on the mass hierarchy. Consequently, results of oscillations and flavor conversion are different for the two hierarchies.
2. Sensitivity to the mass hierarchy appears whenever the matter effect on the 1-3 mixing and mass splitting becomes substantial. This happens in supernovae in large energy range, and in the matter of the Earth.[...] 
4. Multi-megaton scale under ice (water) atmospheric neutrino detectors with low energy threshold (2-3 GeV) may establish mass hierarchy with (3-10)σ confidence level in few years. [...]

Less than three weeks separate us from the XVI Neutrino Telescopes, a very interesting conference held in Venice every two years. The physics of neutrinos is a very special niche in the realm of particle physics, one not devoid of cunning experimental techniques, brilliant theoretical ideas, and offering possible avenues to discover new physics. Hence I am quite happy to be attending the event, from where I will also be blogging (hopefully with the help of a few students in Padova).(NB this article, as others with neutrinos as a subject for the next month or so, appears also in the conference blog).

A preprint article by the IceCube collaboration captured my attention today in the Cornell Arxiv, and even more interesting was the main result of the analysis it reports, which can be shown as a "temperature plot" on an equilateral triangle. We will get to that, but let me first explain what is the experiment, what are the goals, and what it is that was measured.

The sixteenth edition of the internationally known Neutrino Telescopes conference will take place on March 2nd-6th 2015 in the usual venue of Palazzo Franchetti in Venice. This is a conference which gathers from around the world researchers who study neutrino physics and related topics. 

James D. Bjorken, also known as "BJ" by colleagues and physicists around the world, has been awarded the prestigious 2015 Wolf prize in Physics together with cosmologist Robert Kirshner. Bjorken deserves a lot of credit for his contribution to subnuclear physics: the official motivation is 

"For predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon's pointlike constituents "