{
  "id": "1411.2998",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2014-11-11T21:51:08.000Z",
  "updated": "2014-11-11T21:51:08.000Z",
  "title": "On the flavor composition of the high-energy neutrinos in IceCube",
  "authors": [
    "Sergio Palomares-Ruiz",
    "Olga Mena",
    "Aaron C. Vincent"
  ],
  "comment": "9 pages, 3 figures. Prepared for the Proceedings of the 37th International High Energy Conference (ICHEP14), Valencia, June 2-9, 2014",
  "categories": [
    "astro-ph.HE",
    "hep-ph"
  ],
  "abstract": "The IceCube experiment has recently released 3 years of data of the first ever detected high-energy (>30 TeV) neutrinos, which are consistent with an extraterrestrial origin. In this talk, we compute the compatibility of the observed track-to-shower ratio with possible combinations of neutrino flavors with relative proportion (alpha_e:alpha_mu:alpha_tau). Although this observation is naively favored for the canonical (1:1:1) at Earth, once we consider the IceCube expectations for the atmospheric muon and neutrino backgrounds, this flavor combination presents some tension with data. We find that, for an astrophysical neutrino E_nu^{-2} energy spectrum, (1:1:1) at Earth is currently disfavored at 92% C.L. We discuss the trend of this result by comparing the results with the 2-year and 3-year data. We obtain the best-fit for (1:0:0) at Earth, which cannot be achieved from any flavor ratio at sources with averaged oscillations during propagation. Although it is not statistically significant at present, if confirmed, this result would suggest either a misunderstanding of the expected background events, or a misidentification of tracks as showers, or even more compellingly, some exotic physics which deviates from the standard scenario.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2014-11-11T21:51:08.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "high-energy neutrinos",
      "flavor composition",
      "expected background events",
      "flavor ratio",
      "extraterrestrial origin"
    ],
    "tags": [
      "conference paper"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 9,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable",
      "inspire": 1327455,
      "adsabs": "2014arXiv1411.2998P"
    }
  }
}