IceCube constraints on Violation of Equivalence Principle

Abstract

Among the information provided by high energy neutrinos, a promising possibility is to analyze the effects of a Violation of Equivalence Principle (VEP) on neutrino oscillations. We analyze the recently released IceCube data on atmospheric neutrino fluxes under the assumption of a VEP and obtain updated constraints on the parameter space with the benchmark choice that neutrinos with different masses couple with different strengths to the gravitational field. In this case we find that the VEP parameters times the local gravitational potential at Earth can be constrained at the level of $10^{-27}$. We show that the constraints from atmospheric neutrinos strongly depend on the assumption that the neutrino eigenstates interacting diagonally with the gravitational field coincide with the mass eigenstates, which is not \textit{a priori} justified: this is particularly clear in the case that the basis of diagonal gravitational interaction coincide with the flavor basis, which cannot be constrained by the observation of atmospheric neutrinos. Finally, we quantitatively study the effect of a VEP on the flavor composition of the astrophysical neutrinos, stressing again the interplay with the basis in which the VEP is diagonal: we find that for some choices of such basis the flavor ratio measured by IceCube can significantly change.

9 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Updated fit to three neutrino mixing: exploring the accelerator-reactor complementarity
• Calculation of atmospheric neutrino flux using the interaction model calibrated with atmospheric muon data
• Prompt neutrino fluxes from atmospheric charm
• Physics Reach of High-Energy and High-Statistics IceCube Atmospheric Neutrino Data
• Energy dependent neutrino flavor ratios from cosmic accelerators on the Hillas plot
• Inferring the flavor of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at their sources
• IceCube Data for Neutrino Point-Source Searches Years 2008-2018
• Constraining the Violation of Equivalence Principle with IceCube Atmospheric Neutrino Data
• Neutrino telescope modelling of Lorentz invariance violation in oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos
• Effects of the Violation of the Equivalence Principle at DUNE

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Search for Quantum Gravity Using Astrophysical Neutrino Flavour with IceCube
• Probing New Physics at Future Tau Neutrino Telescopes
• Astrophysical and Cosmological Searches for Lorentz Invariance Violation
• The flavor composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos: measurement forecasts for in-ice radio-based EeV neutrino telescopes
• Two-detector flavor sensitivity to ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Violation of Equivalence Principle in Neutrino Sector: Probing the Extended Parameter Space
• Sensitivity of KM3NeT to Violation of Equivalence Principle