No Arabic abstract
We update our estimates of charged and neutral current neutrino total cross sections on isoscalar nucleons at ultrahigh energies using a global (x, Q^2) fit, motivated by the Froissart bound, to the F_2 (electron-proton) structure function utilizing the most recent analysis of the complete ZEUS and H1 data sets from HERA I. Using the large Q^2, small Bjorken-x limits of the wee parton model, we connect the ultrahigh energy neutrino cross sections directly to the large Q^2, small-x extrapolation of our new fit, which we assume saturates the Froissart bound. We compare both to our previous work, which utilized only the smaller ZEUS data set, as well as to recent results of a calculation using the ZEUS-S based global perturbative QCD parton distributions using the combined HERA I results as input. Our new results substantiate our previous conclusions, again predicting significantly smaller cross sections than those predicted by extrapolating pQCD calculations to neutrino energies above 10^9 GeV.
High to ultrahigh energy neutrino detectors can uniquely probe the properties of dark matter $chi$ by searching for the secondary products produced through annihilation and/or decay processes. We evaluate the sensitivities to dark matter thermally averaged annihilation cross section $langlesigma vrangle$ and partial decay width into neutrinos $Gamma_{chirightarrow ubar{ u}}$ (in the mass scale $10^7 leq m_chi/{rm GeV} leq 10^{15}$) for next generation observatories like POEMMA and GRAND. We show that in the range $ 10^7 leq m_chi/{rm GeV} leq 10^{11}$, space-based Cherenkov detectors like POEMMA have the advantage of full-sky coverage and rapid slewing, enabling an optimized dark matter observation strategy focusing on the Galactic center. We also show that ground-based radio detectors such as GRAND can achieve high sensitivities and high duty cycles in radio quiet areas. We compare the sensitivities of next generation neutrino experiments with existing constraints from IceCube and updated 90% C.L. upper limits on $langlesigma vrangle$ and $Gamma_{chirightarrow ubar{ u}}$ using results from the Pierre Auger Collaboration and ANITA. We show that in the range $ 10^7 leq m_chi/{rm GeV} leq 10^{11}$ POEMMA and GRAND10k will improve the neutrino sensitivity to particle dark matter by factors of 2 to 10 over existing limits, whereas GRAND200k will improve this sensitivity by two orders of magnitude. In the range $10^{11} leq m_chi/{rm GeV} leq 10^{15}$, POEMMAs fluorescence observation mode will achieve an unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter properties. Finally, we highlight the importance of the uncertainties related to the dark matter distribution in the Galactic halo, using the latest fit and estimates of the Galactic parameters.
In this paper, we propose a hexagonal description for the flavor composition of ultrahigh-energy (UHE) neutrinos and antineutrinos, which will hopefully be determined at the future large neutrino telescopes. With such a geometrical description, we are able to clearly separate the individual flavor composition of neutrinos from that of antineutrinos in one single regular hexagon, which can be regarded as a natural generalization of the widely-used ternary plot. For illustration, we consider the $pp$ or $pgamma$ collisions as the dominant production mechanism for UHE neutrinos and antineutrinos in the cosmic accelerator, and investigate how neutrino oscillations in the standard picture and in the presence of Lindblad decoherence could change the flavor composition of neutrinos and antineutrinos at neutrino telescopes.
We consider propagation of high energy earth-skimming taus produced in interactions of astrophysical tau neutrinos. For astrophysical tau neutrinos we take generic power-law flux, $E^{-2}$ and the cosmogenic flux initiated by the protons. We calculate tau energy loss in several approaches, such as dipole models and the phenomenological approach in which parameterization of the $F_2$ is used. We evaluate the tau neutrino charged-current cross section using the same approaches for consistency. We find that uncertainty in the neutrino cross section and in the tau energy loss partially compensate giving very small theoretical uncertainty in the emerging tau flux for distances ranging from $2$ km to $100$ km and for the energy range between $10^6$ GeV and $10^{11}$ GeV, focusing on energies above $10^8$ GeV. When we consider uncertainties in the neutrino cross section, inelasticity in neutrino interactions and the tau energy loss, which are not correlated, i.e. they are not all calculated in the same approach, theoretical uncertainty ranges from about $30%$ and $60 %$ at $10^8$ GeV to about factors of 3.3 and 3.8 at $10^{11}$ GeV for the $E^{-2}$ flux and the cosmogenic flux, respectively, for the distance of 10 km rock. The spread in predictions significantly increases for much larger distances, e.g., $sim 1,000$ km. Most of the uncertainty comes from the treatment of photonuclear interactions of the tau in transit through large distances. We also consider Monte Carlo calculation of the tau propagation and we find that the result for the emerging tau flux is in agreement with the result obtained using analytic approach. Our results are relevant to several experiments that are looking for skimming astrophysical taus, such as the Pierre Auger Observatory, HAWC and Ashra. We evaluate the aperture for the Auger and discuss briefly application to the the other two experiments.
Unitarity relates the total cross section for neutrino-nucleon scattering to the neutrino-nucleon forward scattering amplitude. Assuming the validity of the perturbative expansion of the forward amplitude in the {em weak} coupling constant, we derive a unitarity bound on the inelastic cross section. The inelastic cross section saturates this bound at a typical neutrino energy $E_ u simeq 10^8 {rm GeV}$. This implies that calculations of the inelastic cross section that use current parton distribution functions and lowest order weak perturbation theory are unreliable above this energy.
Estimates are made of the ultra-high energy neutrino cross sections based on an extrapolation to very small Bjorken x of the logarithmic Froissart dependence in x shown previously to provide an excellent fit to the measured proton structure function F_2^p(x,Q^2) over a broad range of the virtuality Q^2. Expressions are obtained for both the neutral current and the charged current cross sections. Comparison with an extrapolation based on perturbative QCD shows good agreement for energies where both fit data, but our rates are as much as a factor of 10 smaller for neutrino energies above 10^9 GeV, with important implications for experiments searching for extra-galactic neutrinos.