Constraining the mass scale of a Lorentz-violating Hamiltonian with the measurement of astrophysical neutrino-flavor composition

Abstract

We study Lorentz violation effects on flavor transitions of high energy astrophysical neutrinos. It is shown that the appearance of a Lorentz-violating Hamiltonian can drastically change the flavor transition probabilities of astrophysical neutrinos. Predictions of Lorentz-violation effects on flavor compositions of astrophysical neutrinos arriving on Earth are compared with IceCube flavor composition measurement which analyzes astrophysical neutrino events in the energy range between 25 TeV and 2.8 PeV. Such a comparison indicates that the future IceCube-Gen2 will be able to place stringent constraints on a Lorentz-violating Hamiltonian in the neutrino sector. We work out the expected sensitivities by IceCube-Gen2 on dimension-3 CPT-odd and dimension-4 CPT-even operators in a Lorentz-violating Hamiltonian. The expected sensitivities can improve on the current constraints obtained from other types of experiments by more than two orders of magnitudes for certain ranges of the parameter space.