Redshift leverage for the search of GRB neutrinos affected by quantum properties of spacetime

TL;DR

This study proposes a new method for detecting GRB neutrinos affected by quantum spacetime properties, focusing on GRBs with known redshift and energy-dependent timing, which enhances the analysis despite fewer candidate events.

Contribution

Introduces a redshift-specific, energy-dependent time window approach for searching quantum-spacetime-affected GRB neutrinos, improving analysis sensitivity.

Findings

Results are consistent with previous estimates of in-vacuo dispersion effects.

Analysis suggests redshift knowledge enhances detection prospects.

Findings are statistically inconclusive but motivate further observations.

Abstract

Some previous studies based on IceCube neutrinos had found intriguing preliminary evidence that some of them might be GRB neutrinos with travel times affected by quantum properties of spacetime delaying them proportionally to their energy, an effect often labeled as "quantum-spacetime-induced in-vacuo dispersion". Those previous studies looked for candidate GRB neutrinos in a fixed (neutrino-energy-independent) time window after the GRB onset and relied rather crucially on crude estimates of the redshift of GRBs whose redshift has not been measured. We here introduce a complementary approach to the search of quantum-spacetime-affected GRB neutrinos which restricts the analysis to GRBs of sharply known redshift, and, in a way that we argue is synergistic with having sharp information on redshift, adopts a neutrino-energy-dependent time window. We find that knowing the redshift of the GRBs strengthens the analysis enough to compensate for the fact that of course the restriction to GRBs of known redshift reduces the number of candidate GRB neutrinos. And rather remarkably our estimate of the magnitude of the in-vacuo-dispersion effects is fully consistent with what had been found using the previous approach. Our findings are still inconclusive, since their significance is quantified by a $p$-value of little less than $0.01$, but provide motivation for monitoring the accrual of neutrino observations by IceCube and KM3NeT as well as for further refinements of the strategy of analysis here proposed.