Probing Planck scale physics with IceCube
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 (United States)
Neutrino oscillations can be affected by decoherence induced e.g. by Planck scale suppressed interactions with the space-time foam predicted in some approaches to quantum gravity. We study the prospects for observing such effects at IceCube, using the likely flux of TeV antineutrinos from the Cygnus spiral arm. We formulate the statistical analysis for evaluating the sensitivity to quantum decoherence in the presence of the background from atmospheric neutrinos, as well as from plausible cosmic neutrino sources. We demonstrate that IceCube will improve the sensitivity to decoherence effects of O(E{sup 2}/M{sub Pl}) by 17 orders of magnitude over present limits and, moreover, that it can probe decoherence effects of O(E{sup 3}/M{sub Pl}{sup 2}) which are well beyond the reach of other experiments.
- OSTI ID:
- 20713578
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 72, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.72.065019; (c) 2005 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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