2024/06/21 by Chee Sheng Fong, Fong, Chee Sheng, Yago Porto +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.15566
openalex publication_date 2024/06/21 · openalex created_date 2024/06/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The three Standard Model neutrinos can have Majorana mass or strictly Dirac mass, but both scenarios are practically indistinguishable in neutrino oscillation experiments. If they are pseudo-Dirac, however, there will be new mass splittings among the pseudo-Dirac pairs, potentially leaving traces in neutrino oscillation phenomena. In this work, we use flavor ratios of astrophysical neutrinos to discriminate different possible mass spectra of pseudo-Dirac neutrinos. We show that it will be possible to impose robust bounds of order δm23 \lesssim 10-12 eV2 on the new mass squared splitting involving the third pseudo-Dirac mass eigenstates (those with the least electron flavor composition) with the future experiment IceCube-Gen2. The derived sensitivity is robust because it only assumes an extragalactic origin for the astrophysical neutrinos and hierarchical pseudo-Dirac mass spectrum. In case the neutrino sources are known in the future, such bounds can potentially improve by up to five orders of magnitude, reaching δm23 \lesssim 10-17 eV2.