Probing New Physics with Astrophysical Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper reviews how high-energy astrophysical neutrinos can be used to explore new physics beyond the Standard Model, including exotic neutrino properties and dark matter constraints.

Contribution

It highlights the potential of neutrino astrophysics to probe new physics and summarizes methods to constrain dark matter properties using neutrino observations.

Findings

Neutrinos can reveal exotic properties beyond the electroweak scale.

Neutrino flavor information is crucial for detecting new physics.

Neutrino-based limits impose strong bounds on dark matter annihilation cross-section.

Abstract

We review the prospects for probing new physics with neutrino astrophysics. High energy neutrinos provide an important means of accessing physics beyond the electroweak scale. Neutrinos have a number of advantages over conventional astronomy and, in particular, carry information encoded in their flavor degree of freedom which could reveal a variety of exotic neutrino properties. We also outline ways in which neutrino astrophysics can be used to constrain dark matter properties, and explain how neutrino-based limits lead to a strong general bound on the dark matter total annihilation cross-section.