Matter effects on flavor transitions of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos based on different decoherence schemes

Abstract

The progress of neutrino astronomy makes the precise measurement of the flavor ratio of high energy astronomical neutrinos (HANs) possible in the near future. Then matter effects and new physics effects on the flavor transition of HANs could be tested by the nextgeneration neutrino telescopes. In this paper we consider matter effects in gas which is a realistic environment around the promising sources of HANs. The matter effects are dependent on the decoherence schemes and the sources of neutrinos. We examine the predictions on the flavor ratio at Earth for typical sources with five decoherence schemes. For the muondamping source, the matter effects could be identified in the adiabatic schemes. For the pion-decay source, the decoherence scheme with the non-negligible oscillation effects would be stringently constrained by the observations of the next-generation neutrino telescopes. So the precise measurement of the flavor ratio would provide information on the propagation schemes and the clues on the production mechanism of HANs.