https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6092-6
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Decoherence in neutrino propagation through matter, and bounds from IceCube/DeepCore
1
Theory Department, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, P.O. Box 500, Batavia, IL, 60510, USA
2
Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
3
Instituto de Física Teórica UAM-CSIC, Calle Nicolas Cabrera 13-15, Cantoblanco, 28049, Madrid, Spain
4
Departamento de Física, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, C. P. 38097, Rio de Janeiro, 22451-900, Brazil
* e-mail: jacobo.lopez.pavon@cern.ch
Received:
14
June
2018
Accepted:
19
July
2018
Published online:
1
August
2018
We revisit neutrino oscillations in matter considering the open quantum system framework, which allows to introduce possible decoherence effects generated by New Physics in a phenomenological manner. We assume that the decoherence parameters 
may depend on the neutrino energy, as 
. The case of non-uniform matter is studied in detail and, in particular, we develop a consistent formalism to study the non-adiabatic case dividing the matter profile into an arbitrary number of layers of constant densities. This formalism is then applied to explore the sensitivity of IceCube and DeepCore to this type of effects. Our study is the first atmospheric neutrino analysis where a consistent treatment of the matter effects in the three-neutrino case is performed in presence of decoherence. We show that matter effects are indeed extremely relevant in this context. We find that IceCube is able to considerably improve over current bounds in the solar sector (
) and in the atmospheric sector (
and 
) for 
and, in particular, by several orders of magnitude (between 3 and 9) for the 
cases. For 
we find 
and 
at the 95% CL, for normal (inverted) mass ordering.
© The Author(s), 2018
