Hide-and-seek with cosmic tau neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores how coupling high-energy cosmic neutrinos with ultra-light dark matter and active-sterile oscillations can preserve neutrino flavor ratios and explain anomalous events, with implications for upcoming neutrino observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupling mechanism with dark matter and analyzes active-sterile oscillations to explain neutrino flavor preservation and anomalous detection events.

Findings

Bound on neutrino-dark matter coupling from IceCube data

Active-sterile oscillation effects can increase neutrino survival probability

Potential explanation for ANITA's anomalous neutrino events

Abstract

We first revisit the possibility of preserving the original flavor ratio of high energy cosmic neutrino flux by turning on a coupling between these neutrinos and ultra-light dark matter. We discuss the bound that can be set on such a coupling from the recent $\nu_\tau$ observation by ICECUBE and outline the implications of the coupling for the EeV range cosmic neutrino flux to be observed by upcoming neutrino detectors. We then focus on the $3+1$ scheme when the active sterile oscillation length is of order of 1000~km for EeV range cosmic neutrinos. We show that within this scenario, the probability of survival of an active neutrino passing through the Earth can be sizable, despite the fact that the mean free path of the EeV neutrinos is much smaller than the Earth radius. This opens up the possibility to have neutrino events similar to the two anomalous events reported by ANITA.