Measuring flavor ratios of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos

By J. Beacom, N. Bell, D. Hooper, S. Pakvasa, T. Weiler. 2003

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the prospects for next generation neutrino telescopes, such as IceCube, to measure the flavor ratios of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. The expected flavor ratios at the sources are $\phi_{\nu_e}:\phi_{\nu_{\mu}}:\phi_{\nu_{\tau}} = 1:2:0$, and neutrino oscillations quickly transform these to $1:1:1$. The flavor ratios can be deduced from the relative rates of showers ($\nu_e$ charged-current, most $\nu_\tau$ charged-current, and all flavors neutral-current), muon tracks ($\nu_\mu$ charged-current only), and tau lepton lollipops and double-bangs ($\nu_\tau$ charged-current only). The peak sensitivities for these interactions are at different neutrino energies, but the flavor ratios can be reliably connected by a reasonable measurement of the spectrum shape. Measurement of the astrophysical neutrino flavor ratios tests the assumed production mechanism and also provides a very long baseline test of a number of exotic scenarios, including neutrino decay, CPT violation, and small-$\delta m^2$ oscillations to sterile neutrinos.

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Citations in the corpus

A COMBINED MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD ANALYSIS OF THE HIGH-ENERGY ASTROPHYSICAL NEUTRINO FLUX MEASURED WITH ICECUBE (2015, background): “Finally, the implications of flavor ratios different from the benchmark scenario have been discussed e.g. by Beacom et al. (2003); Lipari et al. (2007); Vissani et al. (2013).”
IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, methodology): “Even small BSM effects could affect flavor mixing, vastly expanding the allowed region of flavor ratios at the Earth and making the flavor ratio measurement a very sensitive probe of BSM physics [193, 197, 276, 277, 279–286].”