Sterile Neutrinos and Flavor Ratios in IceCube

Abstract

The flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos observed in neutrino telescopes is a powerful discriminator between different astrophysical neutrino production mechanisms and can also teach us about the particle physics properties of neutrinos. In this paper, we investigate how the possible existence of light sterile neutrinos can affect these flavor ratios. We consider two scenarios: (i) neutrino production in conventional astrophysical sources, followed by partial oscillation into sterile states; (ii) neutrinos from dark matter decay with a primary flavor composition enhanced in tau neutrinos or sterile neutrinos. Throughout the paper, we constrain the sterile neutrino mixing parameters from a full global fit to short and long baseline data. We present our results in the form of flavor triangles and, for scenario (ii), as exclusion limits on the dark matter mass and lifetime, derived from a fit to IceCube high energy starting events and through-going muons. We argue that identifying a possible flux of neutrinos from dark matter decay may require analyzing the flavor composition as a function of neutrino energy.

15 pages, 6 figures; v2 matched to journal version

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Searching for eV-scale sterile neutrinos with eight years of atmospheric neutrinos at the IceCube neutrino telescope
• Snowmass White Paper: Beyond the Standard Model effects on Neutrino Flavor
• Probing decaying heavy dark matter with the 4-year IceCube HESE data
• Observation of Seven Astrophysical Tau Neutrino Candidates with IceCube
• Tidal effects up to next-to-next-to leading post-Newtonian order in massless scalar-tensor theories
• Energy-Dependent Neutrino Mixing Parameters at Oscillation Experiments
• Tau Appearance from High-Energy Neutrino Interactions
• Tau depolarization at very high energies for neutrino telescopes
• Inferring astrophysical neutrino sources from the Glashow resonance
• Connect the Lorentz Violation to the Glashow Resonance Event
• Neutrino Decoherence via Modified Dispersion