Speaker
Alex Wen
(Harvard University)
Description
We present a previously-unexplored approach to probing the tau component of the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux at neutrino telescopes using the visible inelasticity of starting-track events. Tracks from muonic tau decays are biased toward higher inelasticity than those from muon neutrino interactions, providing a statistical handle to separate the two flavors. Using realistic IceCube exposures, we show that this method achieves competitive sensitivity to the tau-to-muon flavor ratio $R_{\tau\mu}$, using just a single event topology. This technique complements existing searches and introduces a powerful probe of neutrino mixing and flavor-dependent BSM effects over cosmological distances.
Primary authors
Alex Wen
(Harvard University)
Carlos Arguelles
(Harvard University)
Sergio Palomares Ruiz
(Instituto de Física Corpuscular, University of Valencia)
