Visible decay of astrophysical neutrinos at IceCube

Asli Abdullahi,Peter B. Denton

doi:10.1103/physrevd.102.023018

Asli Abdullahi, Peter B. Denton

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.102.023018

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Abstract

Neutrino decay modifies neutrino propagation in a unique way; not only is there flavor changing as there is in neutrino oscillations, there is also energy transport from initial to final neutrinos. The most sensitive direct probe of neutrino decay is currently IceCube which can measure the energy and flavor of neutrinos traveling over extragalactic distances. For the first time we calculate the flavor transition probability for the cases of visible and invisible neutrino decay, including the effects of the expansion of the universe, and consider the implications for IceCube. As an example, we demonstrate how neutrino decay addresses a tension in the IceCube data. We also provide a publicly available code to calculate the effect of visible decay.

Highlights

IceCube’s discovery of a new flux of astrophysical neutrinos at TeV-PeV energies [1,2,3] of extragalactic origin [4,5] opens up the window to many new physics probes
Due to the extremely long distances involved in neutrino propagation, this flux of neutrinos provides a unique opportunity to probe new physics models, in particular neutrino decay
Visible neutrino decay has a rich phenomenology that can be probed at IceCube by simultaneously measuring the flavor and energy of the high energy astrophysical neutrino flux

Summary

Introduction

IceCube’s discovery of a new flux of astrophysical neutrinos at TeV-PeV energies [1,2,3] of extragalactic origin [4,5] opens up the window to many new physics probes. Due to the extremely long distances involved in neutrino propagation, this flux of neutrinos provides a unique opportunity to probe new physics models, in particular neutrino decay. We consider the well-studied Majoron model, which postulates the existence of a singlet Higgs-like scalar with nonzero lepton number [8,9,10,11]. Such a scalar could generate the Majorana mass of a right-handed sterile neutrino through a lepton number violating vacuum expectation value. We are interested in Lagrangian terms of the form

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