Visible Decay of Astrophysical Neutrinos at IceCube

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.

18 pages, 9 figures, comments welcome! Code available at https://github.com/PeterDenton/Astro-Nu-Decay; v2: clarifying remarks and references add, matches published version

References in corpus (19)

• Observation and Characterization of a Cosmic Muon Neutrino Flux from the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data
• Flavor Ratio of Astrophysical Neutrinos above 35 TeV in IceCube
• The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna Ultra-high Energy Neutrino Detector Design, Performance, and Sensitivity for 2006-2007 Balloon Flight
• The Poker Face of the Majoron Dark Matter Model: LUX to keV Line
• Constraints on Galactic Neutrino Emission with Seven Years of IceCube Data
• Status of Oscillation plus Decay of Atmospheric and Long-Baseline Neutrinos
• Neutrino Decays over Cosmological Distances and the Implications for Neutrino Telescopes
• The IceCube Neutrino Observatory - Contributions to ICRC 2017 Part II: Properties of the Atmospheric and Astrophysical Neutrino Flux
• Detecting non-relativistic cosmic neutrinos by capture on tritium: phenomenology and physics potential
• Cold keV dark matter from decays and scatterings
• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• Constraints on neutrino decay lifetime using long-baseline charged and neutral current data
• Testing neutrino flavor mixing plus decay with neutrino telescopes
• Are cosmological neutrinos free-streaming?
• Neutrino flux ratios at neutrino telescopes: The role of uncertainties of neutrino mixing parameters and applications to neutrino decay
• Interpreting IceCube 6-year HESE data as an evidence for hundred TeV decaying Dark Matter
• Discovering leptonic forces using non-conserved currents
• On the Impact of Neutrino Decays on the Supernova Neutronization-Burst Flux
• Neutron β-decay as the origin of IceCube's PeV (anti)neutrinos

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Starburst galaxies strike back: a multi-messenger analysis with Fermi-LAT and IceCube data
• Observation of Seven Astrophysical Tau Neutrino Candidates with IceCube
• Tau Appearance from High-Energy Neutrino Interactions
• SN1987A and neutrino non-radiative decay
• Probing photon-ALP oscillations from the MAGIC observations of FSRQ QSO B1420+326
• Detecting High-Energy Neutrinos from Galactic Supernovae with ATLAS
• Effects of Annihilation with Low-Energy Neutrinos on High-Energy Neutrinos from Binary Neutron Star Mergers and Rare Core-Collapse Supernovae
• Helicity-changing Decays of Cosmological Relic Neutrinos
• Study of large extra dimension and neutrino decay at P2SO experiment
• Probing the Cosmic Neutrino Background and New Physics with TeV-Scale Astrophysical Neutrinos