Probing flavor-dependent long-range interaction of neutrinos in astrophysical neutrino experiments

Sudipta Das, PhD; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa

Astrophysical neutrinos are an excellent cosmic messenger, carrying imprints of their source environments and the physical processes occurring within them. With energy in the TeV-PeV range, these neutrinos traverse megaparsecs (MPc) to gigaparsecs (GPc) scale distances before they reach the Earth. During their journey, tiny physics effects that accumulate over these large propagation paths may become observable at the detector. If there is some new interaction between neutrinos and the background matter, that could potentially affect the propagation of the astrophysical neutrinos. One such possible case is the flavor-dependent long-range interaction of neutrinos, which can modify the standard neutrino flavor transition, hence the flavor composition of the astrophysical neutrinos at Earth. Using the present-day and future projection of the flavor composition measurements of IceCube and other neutrino telescopes along with the present/future measurement of the oscillation parameters, we explore the sensitivity of these experiments to probe long-range interaction.