Upper Bounds on the Neutrino-Nucleon Inelastic Cross Section

Abstract

Extraterrestrial neutrinos can initiate deeply developing air showers, and those that traverse the atmosphere unscathed may produce cascades in the ice or water. Up to now, no such events have been observed. This can be translated into upper limits on the diffuse neutrino flux. On the other hand, the observation of cosmic rays with primary energies > 10^{10} GeV suggests that there is a guaranteed flux of cosmogenic neutrinos, arising from the decay of charged pions (and their muon daughters) produced in proton interactions with the cosmic microwave background. In this work, armed with these cosmogenic neutrinos and the increased exposure of neutrino telescopes we bring up-to-date model-independent upper bounds on the neutrino-nucleon inelastic cross section. Uncertainties in the cosmogenic neutrino flux are discussed and taken into account in our analysis. The prospects for improving these bounds with the Pierre Auger Observatory are also estimated. The unprecedented statistics to be collected by this experiment in 6 yr of operation will probe the neutrino-nucleon inelastic cross section at the level of Standard Model predictions.

To be published in JCAP

References in corpus (8)

• Sensitivity of the IceCube Detector to Astrophysical Sources of High Energy Muon Neutrinos
• Experimental Limit on the Cosmic Diffuse Ultra-high Energy Neutrino Flux
• FORTE satellite constraints on ultra-high energy cosmic particle fluxes
• Galactic Point Sources of TeV Antineutrinos
• Screening effects in the ultrahigh energy neutrino interactions
• Limits on diffuse fluxes of high energy extraterrestrial neutrinos with the AMANDA-B10 detector
• Bounds on the cosmogenic neutrino flux
• Electroweak instantons as a solution to the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray puzzle

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Extracting the Energy-Dependent Neutrino-Nucleon Cross Section Above 10 TeV Using IceCube Showers
• Lorentz and CPT Invariance Violation In High-Energy Neutrinos
• Spacetime noncommutativity and ultra-high energy cosmic ray experiments
• Acceptances for Space-Based and Ground-Based Fluorescence Detectors, and Inference of the Neutrino-Nucleon Cross-Section above 10^19 eV
• Photon-neutrino interaction in theta-exact covariant noncommutative field theory
• Ultra high energy neutrino-nucleon cross section from cosmic ray experiments and neutrino telescopes
• Gravitational Radiation from Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays in Models with Large Extra Dimensions
• Cosmic ray knee and new physics at the TeV scale
• Constraints on Neutrino-Nucleon Interactions at energies of 1 EeV with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory