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Resonant Neutrino Flavor Conversion in the Atmosphere
Preprint   Open access

Resonant Neutrino Flavor Conversion in the Atmosphere

Connor Sponsler, Matheus Hostert, Ivan Martinez-Soler and Carlos A Argüelles
ArXiv.org
Cornell University
05/20/2024
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2405.12140
url
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2405.12140View
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

Abstract

Neutrinos produced in the atmosphere traverse a column density of air before being detected at neutrino observatories like IceCube or KM3NeT. In this work, we extend the neutrino flavor evolution in the nuSQuIDS code accounting for the varying height of neutrino production and the variable air density in the atmosphere. These effects can lead to sizeable spectral distortions in standard neutrino oscillations and are crucial to accurately describe some new physics scenarios. As an example, we study a model of quasi-sterile neutrinos that induce resonant flavor conversions at neutrino energies of O(300) MeV in matter densities of 1 g/cm3. In atmospheric air densities, the same resonance is then realized at neutrino energies of O(300 − 700) GeV. We find that the new resonance can deplete the νμ + νμ flux at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory by as much as 10% in the direction of the horizon.
 Physics - High Energy Physics - Experiment Physics - High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

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