Exploring New Propagation Scales With Galactic Neutrinos

Abstract

The recent observation of high-energy Galactic neutrinos by IceCube allows for searches of new physics affecting neutrino propagation on scales of $O(10^9-10^{15})\,\mathrm{km/GeV}$ in distance over energy. We assess the sensitivity of upcoming measurements of Galactic neutrinos by IceCube and KM3NeT to such new phenomena. We focus on two scenarios: quasi-Dirac neutrinos and neutrino decays. In the quasi-Dirac scenario, we find that joint measurements by IceCube and KM3NeT are sensitive to the mass-squared differences $δm^2 \in \left(10^{-13.6}~\mathrm{eV^2}, 10^{-12.3}~\mathrm{eV^2}\right)$ at the $90\%$ confidence level. For neutrino decays, the same measurements are sensitive to mass over lifetime ratios $m / τ> 10^{-12.8}~\mathrm{eV^2}$ at the same significance. Our results demonstrate that measurements of Galactic neutrinos by a global network of neutrino telescopes can probe signatures of neutrino mass models.