Stringent constraint on neutrino Lorentz invariance violation from the two IceCube PeV neutrinos

Enrico Borriello, Sovan Chakraborty, Alessandro Mirizzi, Pasquale Dario Serpico

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

37 Scopus citations

Abstract

It has been speculated that Lorentz-invariance violation (LIV) might be generated by quantum-gravity (QG) effects. As a consequence, particles may not travel at the universal speed of light. In particular, superluminal extragalactic neutrinos would rapidly lose energy via the bremssthralung of electron-positron pairs (ν→νe+e-), damping their initial energy into electromagnetic cascades, a figure constrained by Fermi-Large Area Telescope data. We show that the two cascade neutrino events with energies around 1 PeV recently detected by IceCube - if attributed to extragalactic diffuse events, as it appears likely - can place the strongest bound on LIV in the neutrino sector, namely, δ=(v2-1)<O(10 -18), corresponding to a QG scale MQG 105MPl (MQG 10-4MPl) for a linear (quadratic) LIV, at least for models inducing superluminal neutrino effects (δ>0).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number116009
JournalPhysical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume87
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 24 2013
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics
  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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