Abstract
We investigate non-standard interactions of neutrinos with atomic nuclei through excitations of leptoquarks. A leptoquark term in the Lagrangian admits the possibility that neutrinos interact with gluons. The current lower limits on the leptoquark masses are of the order of 1 TeV depending on the leptoquark quantum numbers and couplings. Such heavy states can be produced in ultra-high energy cosmic neutrino scattering processes. The four-momentum transfer squared and the Bjorken variable simultaneously probed in these processes may reach values kinematically inaccessible at present collider experiments. We study the impact of the gluon density in a nucleus on the cross section for the neutrino-induced leptoquark production. We show that taking into account the nuclear parton distributions shifts the production threshold to significantly lower neutrino energies. As a particular case we consider the interaction with oxygen, which is abundant in water targets used in neutrino detection experiments.
Highlights
Neutrinos coming from outer space to Earth transmit information about their origin, the environment of propagation and the mechanism of oscillations over cosmological distances and timescales
We consider neutrino scattering on oxygen which is abundant in water/ice neutrino telescopes
The current lower limits on the leptoquark masses are of the order of 1 TeV depending on the quantum numbers and couplings
Summary
Neutrinos coming from outer space to Earth transmit information about their origin, the environment of propagation and the mechanism of oscillations over cosmological distances and timescales. The predicted values of the cross sections at ultra-high energies are subject to the assumptions about the distributions of partons (i.e. quarks and gluons) in the nucleon [6,7,8]. Of special interest is the possibility of leptoquark production induced by ultra-high energy cosmic neutrinos [39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48] In this case, for example, the ντ -component of the astrophysical neutrino flux is concerned [44]. In this article evaluate the cross section for the leptoquark production by ultra-high energy neutrinos taking into account the nuclear gluon distributions.
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