A further study of \mu-\tau symmetry breaking at neutrino telescopes after the Daya Bay and RENO measurements of \theta_{13}

TL;DR

This paper investigates how deviations from ta-tu symmetry, influenced by recent measurements of neutrino mixing angles, affect the flavor distribution of ultrahigh-energy cosmic neutrinos at telescopes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of ta-tu symmetry breaking effects on UHE neutrino flux ratios, including second-order terms, considering recent experimental data.

Findings

Second-order ta-tu symmetry breaking can be comparable to first-order effects.

Flux ratios are sensitive to ta-tu symmetry breaking parameters.

Detection prospects of ta-tu symmetry breaking effects via Glashow resonance are discussed.

Abstract

Current neutrino oscillation data indicate that \theta_{13} is not strongly suppressed and \theta_{23} might have an appreciable deviation from \pi/4, implying that the 3 \times 3 neutrino mixing matrix V does not have an exact \mu-\tau permutation symmetry. We make a further study of the effect of \mu-\tau symmetry breaking on the democratic flavor distribution of ultrahigh-energy (UHE) cosmic neutrinos at a neutrino telescope, and find that it is characterized by |V_{\mu i}|^2 - |V_{\tau i}|^2 which would vanish if either \theta_{23} = \pi/4 and \theta_{13} = 0 or \theta_{23} = \pi/4 and \delta = \pm \pi/2 held. We observe that the second-order \mu-\tau symmetry breaking term \bar{\Delta} may be numerically comparable with or even larger than the first-order term \Delta in the flux ratios \phi^{T}_e : \phi^{T}_\mu : \phi^{T}_\tau \simeq (1- 2\Delta) : (1 + \Delta + \bar{\Delta}) : (1 + \Delta - \bar{\Delta}), if \sin (\theta_{23} - \pi/4) and \cos\delta have the same sign. The detection of the UHE \bar{\nu}_e flux via the Glashow-resonance channel \bar{\nu}_e e \to W^- \to anything is also discussed by taking account of the first- and second-order \mu-\tau symmetry breaking effects.