Testing Weak Equivalence Principle with IceCube Event and Blazar

TL;DR

This paper tests Einstein's Weak Equivalence Principle using high-energy neutrino events from IceCube linked to blazars, achieving significantly tighter constraints on potential violations than previous studies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel test of the WEP with high-energy neutrinos from blazars, improving the constraints by several orders of magnitude.

Findings

Violation of the WEP limited to 10^-6, 10^-7, and 10^-8 for neutrinos and photons.

Constraints are 1-3 orders of magnitude better than previous high-energy neutrino tests.

Results are up to six orders tighter than constraints from SN1987A neutrinos.

Abstract

Einstein's Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP), the universality of free fall, is a fundamental component of general relativity and other metric theories of gravity. Its validity can be tested through the post-Newtonian parameter gamma, which quantifies the amount of spacetime curvature due to the presence of unit rest mass. In this paper, we use high-energy neutrino events detected by IceCube and associated with the gamma-ray blazars TXS 0506+056 and PKS 0735+178 to test the WEP via the Shapiro delay induced by the gravitational potential of Laniakea. We find that violation of the equivalence principle for neutrinos and photons is limited to an accuracy of 10^-6, 10^-7 and 10^-8, representing improvements of one, two, and three orders of magnitude, respectively, over previous constraints obtained from other high-energy neutrino-blazar associations and up to six orders of magnitude tighter compared to the constraints obtained with MeV neutrinos from SN1987A.