Probing High-Energy Interactions of Atmospheric and Astrophysical Neutrinos

Abstract

Astrophysical and atmospheric neutrinos are important probes of the powerful accelerators that produce cosmic-rays with EeV energies. Understanding these accelerators is a key goal of neutrino observatories, along with searches for neutrinos from supernovae, from dark matter annihilation, and other astrophysics topics. Here, we discuss how neutrino observatories like IceCube and future facilities like KM3NeT and IceCube-Gen2 can study the properties of high-energy (above 1 TeV) neutrino interactions. This is far higher than is accessible at man-made accelerators, where the highest energy neutrino beam reached only 500 GeV. In contrast, neutrino observatories have observed events with energies above 5 PeV -10,000 times higher in energy -and future large observatories may probe neutrinos with energies up to 10 20 eV. These data have implications for both Standard Model measurements, such as of low Bjorken−x parton distributions and gluon shadowing, and also for searches for beyond Standard Model physics. This chapter will review the existing techniques and results, and discuss future prospects.

Design and sensitivity of the Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland (RNO-G)

“…The energy regime of neutrino radio detectors encompasses a relatively unmapped parameter space, helping to answer questions about the fundamental neutrino properties such as the behavior of neutrino cross-sections [133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140] and flavor mixing at high energies [141][142][143][144][145][146][147], or even whether neutrinos are stable in general [144,[148][149][150][151][152][153][154]. There is the chance to contribute to broader phenomenology such as the nature of dark matter [155][156][157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167][168][169][170][171], the quest for the fundamental symmetries of nature, [172][173][174][175][176][177]…”

The Radio Neutrino Observatory Greenland (RNO-G)

“…RNO-G will also provide a testbed for fundamental physics at energies in a new energy range (see Ref. [45,46] and references therein). Nucleon and nuclear structure and potential new physics can be probed through cross-section measurements of the interactions of neutrinos with nucleons.…”

Neutrino interaction physics in neutrino telescopes

“…Uncertainties on existing cross section and inelasticity measurements will be significantly reduced by IceCube-Gen2. A planned surface radio array capable of detection Askaryan radiation [108,109] from particle showers will extend the energy reach to the EeV scale, and it should become possible to effectively probe new physics with neutrino cross sections [110]. Such models predict an enhancement of the neutrino interaction rate over CC+NC DIS in the context of large extra dimensions [111,112], leptoquarks [113] and sphalerons [114].…”