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Searching for νμ → ντ Oscillations with Extragalactic Neutrinos
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Searching for νμ → ντ Oscillations with Extragalactic Neutrinos

Sharada Iyer, Mary Hall Reno and Ina Sarcevic
Physical review. D, Particles and fields, Vol.61(5), 053003
03/01/2000
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.61.053003
url
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/9909393View
Open Access

Abstract

We propose a novel approach for studying v- vr oscillations with extragalactic neutrinos. Active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts are believed to be sources of ultrahigh energy muon neutrinos. With distances of 100 Mpc or more, they provide an unusually long baseline for possible detection of VII-VT with mixing parameters am2 down to 10n eV2, many orders of magnitude below the current accelerator experiments. By solving the coupled transport equations, we show that high-energy vr's, as they propagate through the Earth, cascade down in energy, producing the enhancement of the incoming VT flux in the low energy region, in contrast with the high-energy is, which get absorbed. For an AGN quasar model we find the vr flux to be a factor of 2 to 2.5 larger than the incoming flux in the energy range between 102 GeV and 104 GeV, while for a GRB fireball model, the enhancement is 10-27 % in the same energy range and for zero nadir angle. This enhancement decreases with larger nadir angle, thus providing a novel way to search for vr appearance by measuring the angular dependence of the muons. To illustrate how the cascade effect and the vr final flux depend on the steepness of the incoming VT , we show the energy and angular distributions for several generic cases of the incoming tau neutrino flux, FVE- for n=1,2 and 3.6. We show that for the incoming flux that is not too steep, the signal for the appearance of high-energy VT is the enhanced production of lower energy fj. and their distinctive angular dependence, due to the contribution from the decay into fj. just below the detector.
COSMIC GAMMA BURSTS COSMIC NEUTRINOS MUON NEUTRINOS MUONS NEUTRINO OSCILLATION PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS QUASARS TAU NEUTRINOS TAU PARTICLES THEORETICAL DATA

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