Exploring a nonminimal sterile neutrino model involving decay at IceCube

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of neutrino decay together with neutrino oscillations in the context of eV-scale sterile neutrinos. We review the formalism of visible neutrino decay in which one of the decay products is a neutrino that potentially can be observed. We apply the formalism developed for decay to the recent sterile neutrino search performed by IceCube with TeV neutrinos. We show that for a ν 4 lifetime τ 4 /m 4 ≲ 10 −16 eV −1 s, the interpretation of the high-energy IceCube analysis can be significantly changed.

Decaying sterile neutrinos and the short baseline oscillation anomalies

“…The evolution in energy E and time t of a neutrino beam in our model can be described by a neutrino density matrix ρ ν ðE; xÞ (a 4 × 4 matrix in flavor space), the corresponding antineutrino density matrixρ ν ðE; xÞ, and the scalar density function ρ ϕ ðE; tÞ. The evolution equations are [27,28],…”

Searching for eV-scale sterile neutrinos with eight years of atmospheric neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Telescope

“…The 3 þ 1 model is widely used as a benchmark for experimental datasets to examine whether they show evidence for a sterile neutrino. Extensions to this model have been proposed such as adding more neutrino mass states [53], allowing the heavier mass states to decay [27,48,49,54], or introducing secret neutrino interactions [32,[35][36][37]40,[44][45][46][47][55][56][57][58]; these more complex models are not considered further in this work.…”

Invisible Neutrino Decay Could Resolve IceCube’s Track and Cascade Tension

“…Invisible Neutrino Decay.-To solve the tension between the fits provided by the two event topologies, an interesting model modifying the flavor ratio in an energy dependent fashion during propagation is neutrino decay [31][32][33][34]. The latter is described by a new interaction term:…”