Probing Flavor Transition Mechanisms of Astrophysical Neutrinos

Abstract

The determination of neutrino flavor transition mechanism by neutrino telescopes is presented. We first propose a model-independent parametrization for flavor transitions (such as standard three-flavor oscillations, neutrino decays or others) of astrophysical neutrinos propagating from their sources to the Earth. We demonstrate how one can constrain parameters of the above parametrization by performing flavor identifications in neutrino telescopes. Given the anticipated flavor discrimination capability in the future radio-wave based neutrino telescope, we work out the corresponding allowed ranges for flavor transition parameters. The possibility of distinguishing neutrino decay models from the standard three-flavor oscillations in the future neutrino telescope as mentioned is discussed.