Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with beyond the Standard Model physics

摘要

We systematically study the allowed parameter space for the flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos measured at Earth, including beyond the Standard Model theories at production, during propagation, and at detection. One motivation is to illustrate the discrimination power of the next-generation neutrino telescopes such as IceCube-Gen2. We identify several examples that lead to potential deviations from the standard neutrino mixing expectation such as significant sterile neutrino production at the source, effective operators modifying the neutrino propagation at high energies, dark matter interactions in neutrino propagation, or nonstandard interactions in Earth matter. IceCube-Gen2 can exclude about 90% of the allowed parameter space in these cases, and hence will allow us to efficiently test and discriminate between models. More detailed information can be obtained from additional observables such as the energy dependence of the effect, fraction of electron antineutrinos at the Glashow resonance, or number of tau neutrino events.