Potential of Neutrino Telescopes to Detect Quantum Gravity-Induced Decoherence in the Presence of Dark Fermions

TL;DR

This paper explores how neutrino telescopes like IceCube can detect quantum gravity effects through neutrino oscillation damping, especially considering dark fermions, and assesses the sensitivity of such detectors to these phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a model for quantum gravity-induced decoherence involving dark fermions and evaluates the detection potential of neutrino telescopes using Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Neutrino telescopes can potentially detect quantum gravity effects.

Sensitivity increases with the number of dark fermions.

IceCube shows promising capabilities for testing these models.

Abstract

We assess the potential of neutrino telescopes to discover quantum-gravity-induced decoherence effects modeled in the open-quantum system framework and with arbitrary numbers of active and dark fermion generations, such as particle dark matter or sterile neutrinos. The expected damping of neutrino flavor oscillation probabilities as a function of energy and propagation length thus encodes information about quantum gravity effects and the fermion generation multiplicity in the dark sector. We employ a public Monte-Carlo dataset provided by the IceCube Collaboration to model the detector response and estimate the sensitivity of IceCube to oscillation effects in atmospheric neutrinos induced by the presented model. Our findings confirm the potential of very-large-volume neutrino telescopes to test this class of models and indicate higher sensitivities for increasing numbers of dark fermions.