paper

IceCube and GRB neutrinos propagating in quantum spacetime

arXiv:1605.00496 · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2016.07.075

Abstract

Two recent publications have reported intriguing analyses, tentatively suggesting that some aspects of IceCube data might be manifestations of quantum-gravity-modified laws of propagation for neutrinos. We here propose a strategy of data analysis which has the advantage of being applicable to several alternative possibilities for the laws of propagation of neutrinos in a quantum spacetime. In all scenarios here of interest one should find a correlation between the energy of an observed neutrino and the difference between the time of observation of that neutrino and the trigger time of a GRB. We select accordingly some GRB-neutrino candidates among IceCube events, and our data analysis finds a rather strong such correlation. This sort of studies naturally lends itself to the introduction of a "false alarm probability", which for our analysis we estimate conservatively to be of 1%. We therefore argue that our findings should motivate a vigorous program of investigation following the strategy here advocated.

In V2 the possible helicity dependence of the effects (only mentioned in a footnote of V1) is discussed in the main text, and we give an estimate of possible values the parameters could take in order to produce the feature found in the data

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