Exploring Long-Range Interactions in the Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations at IceCube DeepCore

TL;DR

This paper investigates IceCube DeepCore's ability to detect flavor-dependent long-range interactions mediated by a light gauge boson, using 9.3 years of atmospheric neutrino data to explore physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It presents the first sensitivity analysis of IceCube DeepCore to flavor-dependent long-range interactions from gauged lepton-number symmetries.

Findings

Sensitivity to long-range interactions with 9.3 years of data

Constraints on gauged lepton-number symmetry models

Potential to discover new physics beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

The IceCube neutrino observatory consists of an array of Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) instrumenting one cubic-kilometer of deep glacial ice at the South Pole. DeepCore, a densely-spaced sub-array of DOMs at the bottom central region of IceCube, enables the detection of atmospheric neutrinos with an energy threshold in the GeV range. The high statistics data of DeepCore provides a unique opportunity to perform neutrino oscillation studies as well as explore various sub-leading Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics signatures. We consider a well-motivated minimal extension of the Standard Model by an additional anomaly-free, gauged lepton-number symmetry, such as $L_e - L_\mu$ or $L_e - L_\tau$. These symmetries give rise to flavor-dependent long-range interaction mediated through a very light neutral gauge boson. In this contribution, we present the sensitivity of the IceCube DeepCore detector to search for this flavor-dependent long-range interaction potential with a runtime of 9.3 years.