New Physics with Ultra-High Energy Neutrinos
2020225 pages
Supervisor:
Thesis: PhD - Bhupal Dev
- Washington U., St. Louis
- Published: 2020
DOI:
Report number:
- ProQuest-28151778
Citations per year
0 Citations
Abstract: (Washington U., St. Louis)
Ultra-high energy (UHE) astrophysical neutrinos are unique in the sense that they are the only known particles that could travel through incredibly long distance unattenuated, with TeV to EeV energy, much higher than the most powerful man-made collider could provide. The detection of these UHE neutrinos has ushered a new era in neutrino astrophysics, as they carry important information directly from the inside of energetic astrophysical objects. On the other hand, from the particle physics point of view, the UHE neutrinos also offer a new window of opportunity for studying beyond the Standard Model (BSM) phenomena. This is the main theme of this dissertation. We show by explicit examples that by studying the generation and detection mechanism of the UHE neutrinos and their energy spectra at ground-based or airborne neutrino detectors, we can effectively probe some BSM physics with unprecedented sensitivity. Specifically, we discuss how models of heavy dark matter (DM) decay, Zee model with light charged scalars, and R-parity violating supersymmetry (RPV-SUSY) can be probed using the UHE neutrino data from IceCube and ANITA experiments. In the dissertation, we first give a brief review of the SM with special focus on electroweak interactions and then discuss in general the mechanism of astrophysical neutrino generation and interaction with matter under the SM framework. Then, we discuss in detail four projects related to different aspects of BSM extensions of the UHE neutrino physics. xvi In the first project, we mainly focus on the astrophysical aspect of the UHE neutrinos such as the neutrino flux model, flavor composition due to standard or muon-damped pion source and the correlation between the neutrino flux and the gamma-ray flux. A two-component neutrino flux model, with either astrophysical or dark matter origin, and with different flavor compositions is studied. Our combined likelihood analysis, comparing the simulated data from various scenarios of this new flux model and the IceCube high-energy neutrino data, finds that the scenario with a heavy dark matter decay component is mildly preferred over the purely astrophysical flux model. We derive the corresponding best-fit contours in the dark matter mass and lifetime plane. In the second project we turn our eyes back on Earth and focus on a BSM extension of neutrino-matter interaction – the so-called non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI). We propose that a leptophilic light charged scalar could induce a Glashow-like resonance which gives distinguishing signal pattern in the UHE neutrino event spectrum.- neutrino: UHE
- neutrino: flux
- neutrino: interaction
- dark matter: decay
- Zee model
- supersymmetry
- R parity: violation
- muon: magnetic moment
- B: semileptonic decay
- lepton: flavor: violation
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