Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with Beyond the Standard Model physics

TL;DR

This paper explores how next-generation neutrino telescopes can detect deviations from standard neutrino physics caused by beyond the Standard Model phenomena during astrophysical neutrino production, propagation, or detection.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes the parameter space for flavor composition deviations due to BSM physics and evaluates IceCube-Gen2's potential to test these models.

Findings

IceCube-Gen2 can exclude about 90% of BSM parameter space

Potential to identify sterile neutrino production at sources

Ability to distinguish BSM effects via energy dependence and flavor ratios

Abstract

We systematically study the allowed parameter space for the flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos measured at Earth, including beyond the Standard Model theories at production, during propagation, and at detection. One motivation is to illustrate the discrimination power of the next-generation neutrino telescopes such as IceCube-Gen2. We identify several examples that lead to potential deviations from the standard neutrino mixing expectation such as significant sterile neutrino production at the source, effective operators modifying the neutrino propagation at high energies, dark matter interactions in neutrino propagation, or non-standard interactions in Earth matter. IceCube-Gen2 can exclude about 90% of the allowed parameter space in these cases, and hence will allow to efficiently test and discriminate models. More detailed information can be obtained from additional observables such as the energy-dependence of the effect, fraction of electron antineutrinos at the Glashow resonance, or number of tau neutrino events.