Sensitivity of KM3NeT to Violation of Equivalence Principle

TL;DR

This paper forecasts KM3NeT's ability to test violations of the equivalence principle using atmospheric neutrinos, emphasizing the importance of systematic uncertainties in such measurements.

Contribution

It provides a forecast analysis of KM3NeT's sensitivity to VEP and highlights the critical role of systematic uncertainties in neutrino-based tests of fundamental physics.

Findings

KM3NeT can constrain VEP parameters to the level of 10^{-27}.

Systematic uncertainties dominate the sensitivity analysis.

Independent analyses from different telescopes are essential for robust tests.

Abstract

The symmetry of the theory of relativity under diffeomorphisms strongly depends on the equivalence principle. Violation of Equivalence Principle (VEP) can be tested by looking for deviations from the standard framework of neutrino oscillations. In recent works, it has been shown that strong constraints on the VEP parameter space can be placed by means of the atmospheric neutrinos observed by the IceCube neutrino telescope. In this paper, we focus on the KM3NeT neutrino telescope and perform a forecast analysis to assess its capacity to probe VEP. Most importantly, we examine the crucial role played by systematic uncertainties affecting the neutrino observations. We find that KM3NeT will constrain VEP parameters times the local gravitational potential at the level of $10^{-27}$. Due to the systematic-dominated regime, independent analyses from different neutrino telescopes are fundamental for robustly testing the equivalence principle.