Search for new neutral particles with the IceCube neutrino telescope

Details

  • Period: 2022-01-01 – 2025-12-31
  • Funder: Swedish Research Council
  • Type of funding: Research Project Grant

Description

Project title: Search for new neutral particles with the IceCube neutrino telescope
Main applicant: Carlos Perez de los Heros, Division of High Energy Physics
Grant amount: 3 400 000 SEK for the period 2022-2025

IceCube at the South Pole is the largest neutrino telescope in operation. Its main aim is to study the high-energy neutrino sky, but it can also address fundamental physics topics. IceCube detects neutrinos produced in the atmosphere or in cosmic sources of much higher energies than those produced in accelerators. These neutrinos can be used to address, and constrain, new physics scenarios. IceCube has published competitive limits on new particle searches (monopoles, sterile neutrinos) and on tests of fundamental laws (Lorentz invariance, anomalous neutrino interactions) among other topics.

We propose to extend the searches for physics beyond the Standard Model with IceCube to long-lived neutral particles (LLNP), and study the complementarity of IceCube with the prospects of the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a proposed ~100 km circumference, 100 TeV center of mass energy collider under consideration at CERN. LLNPs are a good benchmark to search for physics beyond the Standard Model in a model-independent way. They are not a prediction of a single theory, but practically all the proposed extensions of the Standard Model predict such particles. They are typically weakly interacting, with a wide range of allowed masses and lifetimes. The different center of mass energies available in neutrino-nucleon and proton-proton collisions in IceCube and the FCC, respectively, give access to probe very different regions of the parameter space of LLNPs.

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