Cosmogenic neutrinos and signals of TeV gravity in air showers and neutrino telescopes

Abstract

The existence of extra dimensions allows the possibility that the fundamental scale of gravity is at the TeV. If that is the case, gravity could dominate the interactions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In particular, the production of microscopic black holes by cosmogenic neutrinos has been estimated in a number of papers. We consider here gravity-mediated interactions at larger distances, where they can be calculated in the eikonal approximation. We show that for the expected flux of cosmogenic neutrinos these elastic processes give a stronger signal than black hole production in neutrino telescopes. Taking the bounds on the higher dimensional Planck mass M_D (D=4+n) from current air shower experiments, for n=2 (6) elastic collisions could produce up to 118 (34) events per year at IceCube. On the other hand, the absence of any signal would imply a bound of M_D>~5 TeV.

10 pages, 1 figure; version to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Extracting the Energy-Dependent Neutrino-Nucleon Cross Section Above 10 TeV Using IceCube Showers
• Spectral analysis of the high-energy IceCube neutrinos
• Snowmass White Paper: Beyond the Standard Model effects on Neutrino Flavor
• Analysis of the 4-year IceCube high-energy starting events
• Flavor of cosmic neutrinos preserved by ultralight dark matter
• Cosmic ray air showers from sphalerons
• TeV gravity at neutrino telescopes
• Radiation Problem in Transplanckian Scattering
• A new physics interpretation of the IceCube data
• New physics from ultrahigh energy cosmic rays
• Hawking evaporation of cosmogenic black holes in TeV-gravity models
• Cosmic-ray knee and diffuse gamma, e+ and pbar fluxes from collisions of cosmic rays with dark matter
• Production and propagation of heavy hadrons in air-shower simulators
• Constraining strongly coupled new physics from cosmic rays with machine learning techniques
• Search for Sphalerons: IceCube vs. LHC