Speaker
Description
The discovery of new, flavor-dependent neutrino interactions would provide compelling evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. We focus on interactions generated by the several anomaly-free, gauged, abelian lepton number symmetries that introduce a new matter potential sourced by electrons and neutrons, potentially impacting neutrino flavor oscillations. We estimate constraints on these interactions that can be placed via the flavor composition of the diffuse flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, with TeV-PeV energies, i.e., the proportion of $\nu_e$, $\nu_\mu$, and $\nu_\tau$ in the flux. Because we consider mediators of these new interactions to be ultra-light, lighter than $10^{-10}$ eV, the interaction range is ultra-long, from km to Gpc, allowing vast numbers of electrons and/or neutrons in celestial bodies and the cosmological matter distribution to contribute to this new potential. We leverage the present-day and future sensitivity of high-energy neutrino telescopes and of oscillation experiments to estimate the constraints that could be placed on the coupling strength of these interactions. We predict that the present flavor composition estimates from IceCube would be unable to put constraints on certain classes of symmetries. Meanwhile, for the other symmetries, the IceCube neutrino telescope demonstrates the potential to constrain flavor-dependent long-range interactions.
We also estimate improvement in the sensitivity due to the next-generation neutrino telescopes.
| Working Group | WG 5: Neutrinos Beyond PMNS |
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