Exploring a Non-Minimal Sterile Neutrino Model Involving Decay at IceCube and Beyond

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of neutrino decay together with neutrino oscillations in the context of eV-scale sterile neutrinos. We review the formalism of visible neutrino decay in which one of the decay products is a neutrino that potentially can be observed. We apply the formalism developed for decay to the recent sterile neutrino search performed by IceCube with TeV neutrinos. We show that for ${\nu }_4$ lifetime ${\tau }_4/m_4\lesssim 10^{-16}\mathrm{e}{\mathrm{V}}^{-1}\mathrm{s}$, the interpretation of the high-energy IceCube analysis can be significantly changed.

Comments: 12 pages, 7 figures. Find code at: https://github.com/arguelles/nuSQUIDSDecay