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Register a new userEcho Technique to Distinguish Flavors of Astrophysical Neutrinos
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The flavor composition of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos is a rich observable. However, present analyses cannot effectively distinguish particle showers induced by $ u_e$ versus $ u_tau$. We show that this can be accomplished by measuring the intensities of the delayed, collective light emission from muon decays and neutron captures, which are, on average, greater for $ u_tau$ than for $ u_e$. This new technique would significantly improve tests of the nature of astrophysical sources and of neutrino properties. We discuss the promising prospects for implementing it in IceCube and other detectors.
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The flavor composition of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos can reveal the physics governing their production, propagation, and interaction. The IceCube Collaboration has published the first experimental determination of the ratio of the flux in each flavor to the total. We present, as a theoretical counterpart, new results for the allowed ranges of flavor ratios at Earth for arbitrary flavor ratios in the sources. Our results will allow IceCube to more quickly identify when their data imply standard physics, a general class of new physics with arbitrary (incoherent) combinations of mass eigenstates, or new physics that goes beyond that, e.g., with terms that dominate the Hamiltonian at high energy.
The standard perception is that the detection of high energy (TeV energies and above) neutrinos from an astrophysical object is a conclusive evidence for the presence of hadronic cosmic rays at the source. In the present work we demonstrate that TeV neutrinos can also be originated from energetic electrons via electromagnetic interactions in different potential cosmic ray sources with flux levels comparable to that of the hadronic originated neutrinos at high energies. Our findings thus imply that at least a part of the neutrinos observed by Icecube observatory may be originated from energetic electrons. The present analysis further suggests that only a combine study of TeV gamma rays and neutrinos over a wide energy range from an astrophysical object can unambiguously identify the nature of their parents, hadrons or leptons.
The announcement by the IceCube Collaboration of the observation of 53 astrophysical neutrino candidates in the energy range 0.03 alt E_ u/PeV alt 2 has been greeted with a great deal of justified excitement. Herein we provide fits of single and a broken power-law energy-spectra to these high-energy starting events (HESEs). By comparing our statistical results from fits to (background-free) shower HESE data with the spectral shape of muon neutrinos recently reported by the IceCube Collaboration, we show that there is (3 sigma) evidence for a break in the spectrum of astrophysical neutrinos. After that we use the fitted result to predict the rate of Glashow events (in the ~ 6.3 PeV region) and double-bang tau neutrino events (in the PeV region) just at the threshold of IceCube detection.
In ten years of observations, the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed a neutrino sky in tension with previous expectations for neutrino point source emissions. Astrophysical objects associated with hadronic processes might act as production sites for neutrinos, observed as point sources at Earth. Instead, a nearly isotropic flux of astrophysical neutrinos is observed up to PeV energies, prompting a reassessment of the assumed transport and production physics. This work applies a new physical explanation for neutrino production from populations of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and starburst galaxies to three years of public IceCube point source data. Specifically, cosmic rays (CRs) produced at such sources might interact with extragalactic background light and gas along the line of sight, generating a secondary neutrino flux. This model is tested alongside a number of typical flux weighting schemes, in all cases the all-sky flux contribution being constrained to percent levels of the reported IceCube diffuse astrophysical flux.
Neutrinos offer a window to physics beyond the Standard Model. In particular, high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, with TeV-PeV energies, may provide evidence of new, secret neutrino-neutrino interactions that are stronger than ordinary weak interactions. During their propagation over cosmological distances, high-energy neutrinos could interact with the cosmic neutrino background via secret interactions, developing characteristic energy-dependent features in their observed energy distribution. For the first time, we look for signatures of secret neutrino interactions in the diffuse flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, using 6 years of publicly available IceCube High Energy Starting Events (HESE). We find no significant evidence for secret neutrino interactions, but place competitive upper limits on the coupling strength of the new mediator through which they occur, in the mediator mass range of 1-100 MeV.
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