Francesco Vissani, Giulia Pagliaroli, Francesco L. Villante
In this note, we review the potential of the analyses of neutrino flavor as a clue to the cosmic origin of the ultra high energy events recently seen by IceCube [1,2]. The detection of tau neutrinos would be the cleanest option, but their experimental characterization is difficult even at the highest energies currently seen, about 1 PeV. The study of the fraction of the muon tracks seems more promising. In fact, due to flavor oscillations and for any initial composition, the muon neutrino fraction of the cosmic neutrinos is smaller than the one of the atmospheric neutrinos, even hypothesizing an arbitrarily large contribution from charmed mesons. A good understanding of the detection efficiencies along with a moderate increase in the statistics should provide us with a significant test of the cosmic origin of these events.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0211
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