2010/06/15 by Atri Bhattacharya, Sandhya Choubey, Raj Gandhi +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph.HE #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2010/09/009
published as JCAP 1009:009,2010 · 16 pages, 10 figures
arxiv created 2010/06/15 · openalex publication_date 2010/09/09 · arxiv updated 2014/11/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
We examine how light neutrinos coming from distant active galactic nuclei (AGN) and similar high energy sources may be used as tools to probe non-standard physics. In particular we discuss how studying the energy spectra of each neutrino flavour coming from such distant sources and their distortion relative to each other may serve as pointers to exotic physics such as neutrino decay, Lorentz symmetry violation, pseudo-Dirac effects, CP and CPT violation and quantum decoherence. This allows us to probe hitherto unexplored ranges of parameters for the above cases, for example lifetimes in the range 10 −3 −10 4 s/eV for the case of neutrino decay. We show that standard neutrino oscillations ensure that the different flavours arrive at the earth with similar shapes even if their flavour spectra at source may differ strongly in both shape and magnitude. As a result, observed differences between the spectra of various flavours at the detector would be signatures of non-standard physics altering neutrino fluxes during propagation rather than those arising during their production at source. Since detection of ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos is perhaps imminent, it is possible that such differences in spectral shapes will be tested in neutrino detectors in the near future. To that end, using the IceCube detector as an example, we show how our results translate to observable shower and muon-track event rates.