Hunting the Glashow resonance with PeV neutrino telescopes

Abstract

The Glashow resonant scattering, i.e. ν e + e − → W − → anything, offers us a possibility of disentangling ν e from the total astrophysical neutrino fluxes. Meanwhile, a great number of high-energy neutrino telescopes, with various detection mechanisms, are advancing towards a better understanding of one of the most energetic frontiers of the Universe. In this work, we investigate a connection between through-going muons at IceCube and the Glashow resonance signal through the channel W − → µ. We find that for IceCube, muons from ν e can induce a ∼ 20% excess of PeV events around the horizontal direction. However, the current statistic of IceCube is not enough to observe such an excess. We also address the novel possibility of ν e detection via W − → τ at telescopes aiming to detect Earth-skimming and mountain-penetrating neutrinos. The subsequent hadronic decay of a tau will induce an extensive air shower which can be detected by telescopes with Cherenkov or fluorescence techniques. Similar to IceCube, it is challenging to observe the Glashow resonance excess from the Earth-skimming neutrinos. Nevertheless, we find it is promising to observe Glashow resonance events with a mountain as the target. * huanggy@ihep.ac.cn † qliu246@wisc.edu (Corresponding Author)

Charged Higgs effects in IceCube: PeV events and NSIs

“…There are some explanations of the absence of these Glashow events up to now, as explained in the refs. [19,73,74]. Along with the recent observation of one Glashow resonance event at the IceCube [3], small amount of data and the associated experimental error in the current run render it insignificant enough to be addressed right now.…”

Probing New Physics at Future Tau Neutrino Telescopes

“…On the other hand, the precision measurement of UHE neutrinos can benefit our understanding of fundamental particle physics. For instance, a Glashow resonance event with shower energy around 6 PeV has recently been observed by IceCube [4], which reinforces the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Furthermore, the Ice-Cube events up to PeV energies have been used to constrain the neutrino cross section for the first time at a center-of-mass (COM) energy as high as ∼ 1 TeV for the neutrino-proton collision [31][32][33].…”

“…There might be leptophilic forces which can evade hadron collider limits while affecting the neutrino-electron scattering at tau neutrino telescopes. The impact can be enhanced by the resonant production of exotic charged particles from neutrino-electron scatterings, e.g., ν + e − → ∆ − in type-II seesaw scenario or ν + e − → H − , W − [237,238,238], similar to the Glashow resonance in the SM [28]. For EeV incoming neutrinos, the resonance is at M H = √ s ≈ 1 TeV.…”

Rephasing Invariant for Three-Neutrino Oscillations Governed by a Non-Hermitian Hamiltonian

“…Just at the resonance peak, σ tot ν e e ≈ 250 σ tot ν e N (see, e.g., references [89][90][91] and references therein). We conclude this section by explicitly emphasizing that the master equation to be solved is given by Equation ( 12) and the relevant definitions are given by Equations ( 8) and ( 13)-(15).…”