Flavor composition of the high-energy neutrino events in IceCube.

Abstract

The IceCube experiment has recently reported the observation of 28 high-energy (>30 TeV) neutrino events, separated into 21 showers and 7 muon tracks, consistent with an extraterrestrial origin. In this Letter, we compute the compatibility of such an observation with possible combinations of neutrino flavors with relative proportion (αe:αμ∶ατ)⊕. Although the 7∶21 track-to-shower ratio is naively favored for the canonical (1∶1∶1)⊕ at Earth, this is not true once the atmospheric muon and neutrino backgrounds are properly accounted for. We find that, for an astrophysical neutrino E(-2) energy spectrum, (1∶1∶1)⊕ at Earth is disfavored at 81% C.L. If this proportion does not change, 6 more years of data would be needed to exclude (1∶1∶1)⊕ at Earth at 3σ C.L. Indeed, with the recently released 3-yr data, that flavor composition is excluded at 92% C.L. The best fit is obtained for (1∶0∶0)⊕ at Earth, which cannot be achieved from any flavor ratio at sources with averaged oscillations during propagation. If confirmed, this result would suggest either a misunderstanding of the expected background events or a misidentification of tracks as showers, or even more compellingly, some exotic physics which deviates from the standard scenario.