Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of neutrino telescopes to detect long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos, offering a new avenue to probe physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of charged NLP fluxes from both atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos, highlighting the detectability of such particles at IceCube and analyzing the dependence on particle physics models.

Findings

Atmospheric neutrinos, especially from charmed meson decay, could produce detectable NLP pairs.

Astrophysical neutrino fluxes are uncertain but could also lead to detectable NLP signals.

Proton-nucleon collisions are unlikely to produce observable NLP fluxes.

Abstract

As suggested by some extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, dark matter may be a super-weakly interacting lightest stable particle, while the next-to-lightest particle (NLP) is charged and meta-stable. One could test such a possibility with neutrino telescopes, by detecting the charged NLPs produced in high-energy neutrino collisions with Earth matter. We study the production of charged NLPs by both atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos; only the latter, which is largely uncertain and has not been detected yet, was the focus of previous studies. We compute the resulting fluxes of the charged NLPs, compare those of different origins, and analyze the dependence on the underlying particle physics setup. We point out that even if the astrophysical neutrino flux is very small, atmospheric neutrinos, especially those from the prompt decay of charmed mesons, may provide a detectable flux of NLP pairs at neutrino telescopes such as IceCube. We also comment on the flux of charged NLPs expected from proton-nucleon collisions, and show that, for theoretically motivated and phenomenologically viable models, it is typically sub-dominant and below detectable rates.