Astrophysical neutrinos are powerful tools for investigating the fundamental properties of particle physics through their flavor content. In this Letter, we perform the first general new physics ...study on ultrahigh energy neutrino flavor content by introducing effective operators. We find that, at the current limits on these operators, new physics terms cause maximal effects on the flavor content; however, the flavor content on the Earth is confined to a region related to the assumed initial flavor content. Furthermore, we conclude that a precise measure of the flavor content on the Earth will provide orders of magnitude improvement on new physics bounds. Finally, we discuss the current best fits of flavor content of the IceCube data and their interplay with new physics scenarios.
Heavy neutrinos with additional interactions have recently been proposed as an explanation to the MiniBooNE excess. These scenarios often rely on marginally boosted particles to explain the excess ...angular spectrum, thus predicting large rates at higher-energy neutrino-electron scattering experiments. We place new constraints on this class of models based on neutrino-electron scattering sideband measurements performed at MINERνA and CHARM-II. A simultaneous explanation of the angular and energy distributions of the MiniBooNE excess in terms of heavy neutrinos with light mediators is severely constrained by our analysis. In general, high-energy neutrino-electron scattering experiments provide strong constraints on explanations of the MiniBooNE observation involving light mediators.
Abstract
We critically examine the ability of future neutrino
telescopes, including Baikal-GVD, KM3NeT, P-ONE, TAMBO, and
IceCube-Gen2, to determine the flavor composition of high-energy
...astrophysical neutrinos in light of data from next-generation of
neutrino oscillation experiments including JUNO, DUNE, and
Hyper-Kamiokande. By 2040, the region of allowed flavor composition
at Earth will shrink ten-fold, and the flavor composition at the
astrophysical sources of the neutrinos will be inferred to within
6%, enough to pinpoint the dominant neutrino production mechanism
and to identify possible sub-dominant mechanisms. These conclusions
hold even in the nonstandard scenario where neutrino mixing is
non-unitary, a scenario that will be probed in next-generation
experiments such as the IceCube-Upgrade. As an illustration, we show
that future experiments are sensitive to decay rates of the heavier
neutrinos to below 1.8 × 10
-5
(m/eV) s
-1
at
95% credibility by 2040.
A
bstract
For nearly a century, studying cosmic-ray air showers has driven progress in our understanding of elementary particle physics. In this work, we revisit the production of millicharged ...particles in these atmospheric showers and provide new constraints for XENON1T and Super-Kamiokande and new sensitivity estimates of current and future detectors, such as JUNO. We discuss distinct search strategies, specifically studies of single-energy-deposition events, where one electron in the detector receives a relatively large energy transfer, as well as multiple-scattering events consisting of (at least) two relatively small energy depositions. We demonstrate that these atmospheric search strategies — especially the multiple-scattering signature — provide significant room for improvement beyond existing searches, in a way that is complementary to anthropogenic, beam-based searches for MeV-GeV millicharged particles. Finally, we also discuss the implementation of a Monte Carlo simulation for millicharged particle detection in large-volume neutrino detectors, such as IceCube.
We study the production of sterile neutrinos in supernovae, focusing in particular on the keV-MeV mass range, which is the most interesting range if sterile neutrinos are to account for the dark ...matter in the Universe. Focusing on the simplest scenario in which sterile neutrinos mix only with muon or tau neutrinos, we argue that the production of keV-MeV sterile neutrinos can be strongly enhanced by a Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) resonance, so that a substantial flux is expected to emerge from a supernova, even if vacuum mixing angles between active and sterile neutrinos are tiny. Using energetics arguments, this yields limits on the sterile neutrino parameter space that decrease to mixing angles on the order of sin22θ≲10−14 and are up to an order of magnitude stronger than those from X-ray observations. Although supernova limits suffer from larger systematic uncertainties than X-ray limits, they apply also to scenarios in which sterile neutrinos are not abundantly produced in the early Universe. We also compute the flux of O(MeV) photons expected from the decay of sterile neutrinos produced in supernovae but find that it is beyond current observational reach even for a nearby supernova.
We show that the high-energy cosmic neutrinos seen by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory can be used to probe interactions between neutrinos and the dark sector that cannot be reached by current ...cosmological methods. The origin of the observed neutrinos is still unknown, and their arrival directions are compatible with an isotropic distribution. This observation, together with dedicated studies of Galactic plane correlations, suggests a predominantly extragalactic origin. Interactions between this isotropic extragalactic flux and the dense dark matter (DM) bulge of the Milky Way would thus lead to an observable imprint on the distribution, which would be seen by IceCube as (i) slightly suppressed fluxes at energies below a PeV and (ii) a deficit of events in the direction of the Galactic center. We perform an extended unbinned likelihood analysis using the four-year high-energy starting event data set to constrain the strength of DM-neutrino interactions for two model classes. We find that, in spite of low statistics, IceCube can probe regions of the parameter space inaccessible to current cosmological methods.
Dark matter annihilation to neutrinos Argüelles, Carlos A.; Diaz, Alejandro; Kheirandish, Ali ...
Reviews of modern physics,
09/2021, Letnik:
93, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The annihilation of dark matter into neutrinos over a range of dark matter masses from MeV/c2 to ZeV/c2 is reviewed. Thermally produced models of dark matter are expected to self-annihilate to ...standard model products. As no such signal has yet been detected, neutrino detectors are turned to in order to constrain the "most invisible channel." The experimental techniques that are used to detect neutrinos are reviewed, and the expected contributions to the neutrino flux at current and upcoming neutrino experiments is revisited. Updated constraints are placed on the dark matter self-annihilation cross section to neutrinos ⟨σv⟩ using the most recent data, and the sensitivity of upcoming experiments such as Hyper-Kamiokande, Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), and IceCube Gen2 is forecasted. Where possible, limits and projections are scaled to a single set of dark matter halo parameters for consistent comparison. Galactic and extragalactic signals of s -, p -, and d -wave annihilation processes directly into neutrino pairs are considered, yielding constraints that range from ⟨ σ v ⟩ ∼ 2.5 × 10−26 cm3s−1 at 30 MeV/c2 to 10−17 cm3 s−1 at 1011 Ge V/c2. Experiments that report directional and energy information of their events provide much stronger constraints, outlining the importance of making such data public.
Tau neutrinos are unique cosmic messengers, especially at extreme energies. When they undergo a charged-current interaction, the short lifetime of the produced tau gives rise to secondary tau ...neutrinos that carry a significant fraction of the primary neutrino energy. Here we apply this effect, known as tau neutrino regeneration, to extremely high energy neutrinos passing through Earth. We find that for most column depths, with the exception of propagation through the core, Earth-traversing tau neutrinos emerge at (PeV) energies. We use these secondaries to estimate the expected signal from cosmogenic fluxes at IceCube and find a non-negligible contribution to the astrophysical component above 1 PeV . We also constrain the anomalous ANITA observations via the accompanying secondaries expected at IceCube. We calculate that ANITA should see fewer than 10−7 events in the reported direction, regardless of assumed source energy spectrum, ruling out the possibility that these events are astrophysical in origin under Standard Model assumptions.
Indirect searches for signatures of corpuscular dark matter have been performed using all cosmic messengers: gamma rays, cosmic rays, and neutrinos. The search for dark matter from neutrinos is of ...particular importance since they are the only courier that can reach detectors from dark matter processes in dense environments, such as the core of the Sun or Earth, or from the edge of the observable Universe. In this work, we introduce χaroν, a software package that, in the spirit of its mythological Greek namesake χ´αρων, bridges the dark sector and Standard Model by predicting neutrino fluxes from different celestial dark matter agglomerations. The flux at the point of production is either computed internally by χaroν or is taken from user supplied tables. χaroν then propagates this flux through vacuum or dense media and returns the expected neutrino yield at an observer's location. In developing χaroν, we have revisited and updated the production of neutrinos in dense media, updated the propagation of high-energy neutrinos, and studied the sources of uncertainty in neutrino transport. This package is coupled to a new calculation that includes electroweak corrections resulting in the most up-to-date and complete repository of neutrino fluxes from dark matter decay and annihilation over the energy range of 1 GeV to 10 PeV coming from the Earth, the Sun, and the Galactic halo.
IceCube and the origin of ANITA-IV events Bertólez-Martínez, Toni; Argüelles, Carlos A.; Esteban, Ivan ...
The journal of high energy physics,
07/2023, Letnik:
2023, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
A
bstract
Recently, the ANITA collaboration announced the detection of new, unsettling upgoing Ultra-High-Energy (UHE) events. Understanding their origin is pressing to ensure success of the incoming ...UHE neutrino program. In this work, we study their internal consistency and the implications of the lack of similar events in IceCube. We introduce a generic, simple parametrization to study the compatibility between these two observatories in Standard Model-like and Beyond Standard Model scenarios: an incoming flux of particles that interact with Earth nucleons with cross section
σ
, producing particle showers along with long-lived particles that decay with lifetime
τ
and generate a shower that explains ANITA observations. We find that the ANITA angular distribution imposes significant constraints, and when including null observations from IceCube only
τ
~ 10
−
3
–10
−
2
s and
σ
~ 10
−
33
– 10
−
32
cm
2
can explain the data. This hypothesis is testable with future IceCube data. Finally, we discuss a specific model that can realize this scenario. Our analysis highlights the importance of simultaneous observations by high-energy optical neutrino telescopes and new UHE radio detectors to uncover cosmogenic neutrinos or discover new physics.
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