Probing New Physics at Future Tau Neutrino Telescopes

TL;DR

Upcoming tau neutrino telescopes can explore new physics scenarios like charged Higgs and leptoquarks by analyzing high-energy neutrino interactions, offering complementary sensitivities beyond current collider constraints.

Contribution

This paper identifies and evaluates the sensitivity of future tau neutrino telescopes to new physics models involving second and third generation quarks, using detailed propagation and statistical analyses.

Findings

Tau neutrino telescopes can surpass collider constraints in probing new physics.

Combination of telescopes enhances sensitivity to different new physics models.

Energy and angular distributions provide distinctive signatures of new physics.

Abstract

We systematically investigate new physics scenarios that can modify the interactions between neutrinos and matter at upcoming tau neutrino telescopes, which will test neutrino-proton collisions with energies $ \gtrsim 45~{\rm TeV}$, and can provide unique insights to the elusive tau neutrino. At such high energy scales, the impact of parton distribution functions of second and third generations of quarks (usually suppressed) can be comparable to the contribution of first generation with small momentum fraction, hence making tau neutrino telescopes an excellent facility to probe new physics associated with second and third families. Among an inclusive set of particle physics models, we identify new physics scenarios at tree level that can give competitive contributions to the neutrino cross sections while staying within laboratory constraints: charged/neutral Higgs and leptoquarks. Our analysis is close to the actual experimental configurations of the telescopes, and we perform a $\chi^2$-analysis on the energy and angular distributions of the tau events. By numerically solving the propagation equations of neutrino and tau fluxes in matter, we obtain the sensitivities of representative upcoming tau neutrino telescopes, GRAND, POEMMA and Trinity, to the charged Higgs and leptoquark models. While each of the experiments can achieve a sensitivity better than the current collider reaches for certain models, their combination is remarkably complementary in probing the new physics. In particular, the new physics will affect the energy and angular distributions in different ways at those telescopes.