Scholarship 23/04036-1 - Matéria escura, Modelo padrão - BV FAPESP
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Probing New Physics in IceCube

Grant number: 23/04036-1
Support Opportunities:Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
Start date until: September 01, 2023
End date until: August 31, 2025
Field of knowledge:Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - Elementary Particle Physics and Fields
Principal Investigator:Gustavo Alberto Burdman
Grantee:Rafiqul Rahaman
Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
Associated research grant:19/04837-9 - Particle Physics Phenomenology, AP.TEM

Abstract

The IceCube neutrino telescope in the South Pole was designed to observe high en- ergy neutrinos coming from the cosmos through their interactions with the Antartic ice. The multipurpose detector which encompasses a cubic kilometer of instrumented ice also includes a surface array (IceTop) and a dense infill array (DeepCore).In 2013 IceCube discovered evidence of a diffuse flux of cosmic neutrinos above 100 TeV [1, 2]. Since then they have confirmed their discovery, continuously collecting data with contained events and throughgoing muons [3]. The flux shows some interesting spectral features [4] but the origin of these events was completely unknown until quite recently. A flaring gamma ray blazar, TXS 0506+056, was identified by a combination of different telescopes as the source of one of these neutrinos, a high-energy neutrino detected on September 22, 2017. Furthermore, IceCube performed a search in their data and found an excess of neutrinos pointing to this same source during a flare that lasted over 100 days in 2014. This clearly implies that flaring sources strongly contribute to the flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos and of cosmic rays, but there might be other sources too.Besides understanding where and how those neutrinos were produced, it is possible to use them to investigate beyond the Standard Model physics. In particular, one can use the data to look for the production of new particles. For instance, the observed neutrino spectrum can be used to constraint the production and the decays of a heavy long-lived particle of mass in the PeV range [5] . The data is also suitable to probe the production of scalar leptoquarks with masses up to 650 GeV and couplings only to heavy quark flavors which may be connected to solving discrepancies in B-meson semileptonic decays [6].In a wide class of models, most of them based on the seesaw mechanism, the small- ness of neutrino masses is connected to the existence of heavy right-handed fermions which would have very small couplings relative to the Standard Model fermions. If these right-handed neutrinos are within the reach of current experiments, these tiny couplings suggest that these right-handed neutrinos are very long-lived particles. In general, the UV complete versions of these models also predict the existence of other particles such as gauge bosons associated with the breaking of some local symmetry, such as the B L or the left-right symmetry. These models can provide different production mechanisms for right-handed neutrino with masses in the GeV-TeV range. It has been shown that the proposed MATHUSLA detector [7] can probe a large range of the parameter space (generally speaking this depends on the mass mN of the right-handed neutrino and on the mixing |U±N |2 between the right-handed and one of the light active neutrinos of flavor ± = e, ¼ or Ä ) allowed for the production of right-handed neutrinos in these models.It seems that IceCube can also be useful in this quest for these right-handed neutrinos, at least for those with a mass of a few GeV, as they could be produced in atmospheric showers by W/Z decays or by B/D-meson decays. This mass range is of special interest as these right-handed neutrinos can explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe via low-scale leptogenesis via the freeze-in scenario [8].The purpose of this project is to investigate the potential of IceCube to search forright-handed neutrinos in different theoretical scenarios, estimating the sensitivity of this detector for different model assumptions and compare our results to the current limits from accelerator experiments, neutrino oscillation experiments and primordial nucleosynthesis. The UV complete models that can be explored include models with B L symmetry broken at the TeV scale, models with low mass Z2 and left-right symmetric models.

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