Probing Quantum Gravity with Elastic Interactions of Ultra-High-Energy Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores how future radio telescopes detecting ultra-high-energy neutrinos could reveal signs of low-scale quantum gravity through increased interaction events, though measuring total cross sections remains challenging without additional assumptions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that TeV-scale gravity can significantly enhance neutrino-nucleon interactions detectable by IceCube-Gen2, highlighting potential for probing quantum gravity effects.

Findings

TeV-scale gravity increases neutrino interaction rates.

Radio telescopes can detect signs of quantum gravity.

Measuring total cross sections requires assumptions on inelasticity.

Abstract

The next generation of radio telescopes will be sensitive to low-scale quantum gravity by measuring ultra-high-energy neutrinos. In this letter, we demonstrate for the first time that neutrino-nucleon soft interactions induced by TeV-scale gravity would significantly increase the number of events detected by the IceCube-Gen2 radio array in the EeV regime. However, we show that these experiments cannot measure the total cross section using only the angular and energy information of the neutrino flux, unless assumptions on the underlying inelasticity distribution of neutral interactions are made.