How Unequal Fluxes of High Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos and Antineutrinos can Fake New Physics

Abstract

Flavor ratios of very high energy astrophysical neutrinos, which can be studied at the Earth by a neutrino telescope such as IceCube, can serve to diagnose their production mechanism at the astrophysical source. The flavor ratios for neutrinos and antineutrinos can be quite different as we do not know how they are produced in the astrophysical environment. Due to this uncertainty the neutrino and antineutrino flavor ratios at the Earth also could be quite different. Nonetheless, it is generally assumed that flavor ratios for neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same at the Earth, in fitting the high energy astrophysical neutrino data. This is a reasonable assumption for the limited statistics for the data we currently have. However, in the future the fit must be performed allowing for a possible discrepancy in these two fractions in order to be able to disentangle different production mechanisms at the source from new physics in the neutrino sector. To reinforce this issue, in this work we show that a wrong assumption about the distribution of neutrino flavor ratios at the Earth may indeed lead to misleading interpretations of IceCube results.

V2: 19 pages, 7 figures, improved discussion, to appear in JCAP

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Cited by in corpus (16)

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• The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND): Science and Design
• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• Invisible Neutrino Decay Resolves IceCube's Track and Cascade Tension
• Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with Beyond the Standard Model physics
• Universe's Worth of Electrons to Probe Long-Range Interactions of High-Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Flavor of cosmic neutrinos preserved by ultralight dark matter
• Distinguishing Dirac and Majorana neutrinos by their gravi-majoron decays
• Sterile Neutrinos and Flavor Ratios in IceCube
• Unitarity Bounds of Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Seeking leptoquarks in IceCube
• Flavors of Astrophysical Neutrinos with Active-Sterile Mixing
• Flavor ratios of astrophysical neutrinos interacting with stochastic gravitational waves having arbitrary spectra
• Flavor and energy inference for the high-energy IceCube neutrinos
• Searching New Particles at Neutrino Telescopes with Quantum-Gravitational Decoherence
• Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes as a Potential Veto Array for Neutrino Astronomy