Extracting the Energy-Dependent Neutrino-Nucleon Cross Section Above 10 TeV Using IceCube Showers

Neutrinos are key to probing the deep structure of matter and the high-energy Universe. Yet, until recently, their interactions had only been measured at laboratory energies up to about 350 GeV. An opportunity to measure their interactions at higher energies opened up with the detection of high-energy neutrinos in IceCube, partially of astrophysical origin. Scattering off matter inside the Earth affects the distribution of their arrival directions --- from this, we extract the neutrino-nucleon cross section at energies from 18 TeV to 2 PeV, in four energy bins, in spite of uncertainties in the neutrino flux. Using six years of public IceCube High-Energy Starting Events, we explicitly show for the first time that the energy dependence of the cross section above 18 TeV agrees with the predicted softer-than-linear dependence, and reaffirm the absence of new physics that would make the cross section rise sharply, up to a center-of-mass energy of ~1 TeV.Comment: 5 pages main text, 5 figures, technical appendices. Matches published versio

UHE neutrino and cosmic ray emission from GRBs: revising the models and clarifying the cosmic ray-neutrino connection

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have long been held as one of the most promising sources of ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos. The internal shock model of GRB emission posits the joint production of UHE cosmic ray (UHECRs, above 10^8 GeV), photons, and neutrinos, through photohadronic interactions between source photons and magnetically-confined energetic protons, that occur when relativistically-expanding matter shells loaded with baryons collide with one another. While neutrino observations by IceCube have now ruled out the simplest version of the internal shock model, we show that a revised calculation of the emission, together with the consideration of the full photohadronic cross section and other particle physics effects, results in a prediction of the prompt GRB neutrino flux that still lies one order of magnitude below the current upper bounds, as recently exemplified by the results from ANTARES. In addition, we show that by allowing protons to directly escape their magnetic confinement without interacting at the source, we are able to partially decouple the cosmic ray and prompt neutrino emission, which grants the freedom to fit the UHECR observations while respecting the neutrino upper bounds. Finally, we briefly present advances towards pinning down the precise relation between UHECRs and UHE neutrinos, including the baryonic loading required to fit UHECR observations, and we will assess the role that very large volume neutrino telescopes play in this.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To be published in Proceedings of the 6th Very Large Volume Neutrino Telescope Workshop (VLVnT13), Stockholm, Sweden, 5-7 August, 201

Are gamma-ray bursts the sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays?

We reconsider the possibility that gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the sources of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) within the internal shock model, assuming a pure proton composition of the UHECRs. For the first time, we combine the information from gamma-rays, cosmic rays, prompt neutrinos, and cosmogenic neutrinos quantitatively in a joint cosmic ray production and propagation model, and we show that the information on the cosmic energy budget can be obtained as a consequence. In addition to the neutron model, we consider alternative scenarios for the cosmic ray escape from the GRBs, i.e., that cosmic rays can leak from the sources. We find that the dip model, which describes the ankle in UHECR observations by the pair production dip, is strongly disfavored in combination with the internal shock model because a) unrealistically high baryonic loadings (energy in protons versus energy in electrons/gamma-rays) are needed for the individual GRBs and b) the prompt neutrino flux easily overshoots the corresponding neutrino bound. On the other hand, GRBs may account for the UHECRs in the ankle transition model if cosmic rays leak out from the source at the highest energies. In that case, we demonstrate that future neutrino observations can efficiently test most of the parameter space -- unless the baryonic loading is much larger than previously anticipated.Comment: 55 pages, 23 figures, 1 table. Version accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics. Main analysis performed with TA data; for plots with HiRes data, see v

Unitarity Bounds of Astrophysical Neutrinos

The flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos observed at neutrino telescopes is related to the initial composition at their sources via oscillation-averaged flavor transitions. If the time evolution of the neutrino flavor states is unitary, the probability of neutrinos changing flavor is solely determined by the unitary mixing matrix that relates the neutrino flavor and propagation eigenstates. In this paper we derive general bounds on the flavor composition of TeV-PeV astrophysical neutrinos based on unitarity constraints. These bounds are useful for studying the flavor composition of high-energy neutrinos, where energy-dependent nonstandard flavor mixing can dominate over the standard mixing observed in accelerator, reactor, and atmospheric neutrino oscillations.Comment: revised manuscript published in Phys. Rev. D 98, 123023 (2018

Theoretically palatable flavor combinations of astrophysical neutrinos

The flavor composition of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos can reveal the physics governing their production, propagation, and interaction. The IceCube Collaboration has published the first experimental determination of the ratio of the flux in each flavor to the total. We present, as a theoretical counterpart, new results for the allowed ranges of flavor ratios at Earth for arbitrary flavor ratios in the sources. Our results will allow IceCube to more quickly identify when their data imply standard physics, a general class of new physics with arbitrary (incoherent) combinations of mass eigenstates, or new physics that goes beyond that, e.g., with terms that dominate the Hamiltonian at high energy.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures. Matches published versio