2020/04/15 by Mauricio Bustamante, Bustamante, Mauricio · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Neutrino Physics Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.06844
openalex publication_date 2020/04/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Discovering neutrino decay would be strong evidence of new physics. Presently, there are only lax lower limits on the lifetime τ of neutrinos, of τ/m > 10-3 s eV-1 or worse, where m is the neutrino mass. Fortunately, TeV-PeV cosmic neutrinos offer superior sensitivity to decay due to their cosmological-scale baselines. We employ a promising method, recently proposed, that uses the Glashow resonance νe + e → W, triggered by νe of 6.3 PeV, to test decay with only a handful of detected events. Based on the recent detection of the first Glashow resonance candidate in IceCube, we place new lower limits on the lifetimes of ν1 and ν2 in the inverted mass ordering. For ν2, our limit is the current best. For ν1, our limit is close to the current best and will surpass it soon.