R-parity violating supersymmetry at IceCube

Abstract

The presence of R-parity violating (RPV) supersymmetric interactions involving high-energy neutrinos can lead to resonant production of TeV-scale squarks inside large-volume neutrino detectors. Using the ultra-high energy neutrino events observed recently at the IceCube, with the fact that for a given power-law flux of astrophysical neutrinos, there is no statistically significant deviation in the current data from the Standard Model expectations, we derive robust upper limits on the RPV couplings as a function of the resonantly-produced squark mass, independent of the other unknown model parameters, as long as the squarks decay dominantly to 2-body final states involving leptons and quarks through the RPV couplings. With more statistics, we expect these limits to be comparable/complementary to the existing limits from direct collider searches and other low-energy processes.

Searching for leptoquarks at IceCube and the LHC

“…We end this section by noting that we have not used angular information, nor have we allowed the flavor composition of the astrophysical flux to vary. Reference [54] has shown that this can help, notably by removing theν e component leading to the Glashow peak. We anticipate that angular information would lead to a slight improvement in the significance of our results, whereas allowing the flavor composition to vary would weaken it, and require extra motivation to explain the lack of aν e flux.…”

“…This distinction is important, as the different contributions to the event rates have very different topological signatures. These are crucial: previous studies [50,52,53,56,57] have examined the impact of an extra leptoquark-induced interaction (or a similar R-parity violating SUSY model [54]) on the best-fit fluxes reported by the IceCube Collaboration. However, this is not self-consistent, as the fluxes were derived using the same data set.…”

“…Indeed, the center of mass energy scale of a PeV neutrino colliding with a nucleon at rest is just the right scale to excite a ∼TeV leptoquark resonance [65]. Many studies have made the claim that such a process can improve the fit to the observed event rate [50,[52][53][54]56,57]. These are often framed in terms of an excess that requires a nonstandard explanation; however, it should be stressed that the observed event rate falls within the expected Waxman-Bahcall flux [66], consistent with a common origin with cosmic rays (see also [67] for a review).…”

Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with beyond the Standard Model physics

“…Additional BSM physics can be constrained by IceCube, whether it alters the neutrino flavor composition or not. High-energy neutrinos can resonantly produce TeV-scale squarks, and upper limits on the R-parity-violating couplings can be derived as a function of the squark's mass [103].…”

Zee-Burst: A New Probe of Neutrino Nonstandard Interactions at IceCube

“…An interesting alternative is the existence of secret neutrino interactions with a light (MeV-scale) Z [23][24][25][26] or light neutrinophilic neutral scalar [27][28][29], in which case the resonance could again fall in the multi-TeV to PeV range which will be accessible at IceCube. Heavy (TeV-scale) resonances induced by neutrino-nucleon interactions mediated by exotic charged particles, such as leptoquarks [30][31][32][33], or squarks in R-parity violating supersymmetry [34][35][36][37]. have also been discussed.…”