https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01849-9
Regular Article
Probing the cosmic sterile-neutrino background with IceCube
1
Department of Physics, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, 333031, Pilani, Rajasthan, India
2
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southern California, 90089, Los Angeles, CA, USA
a
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Received:
8
July
2025
Accepted:
6
August
2025
Published online:
18
August
2025
Abstract
The interaction between a cosmic sterile-neutrino background and high-energy astrophysical neutrinos can produce characteristic dips in the astrophysical neutrino spectrum observed by IceCube. In our original work [2409.12145], we have investigated this possibility using the high-energy starting events (HESE) and Glashow resonance events detected by the IceCube detector. Our analysis shows that the inclusion of dips in the neutrino flux results in a modest preference for a lower spectral index of 
, compared to that in the single power-law model. This reduction in the spectral index helps alleviate the tension between the HESE and Northern Track datasets. In addition, we present a forecast of the expected event spectrum at IceCube-Gen2 for the two best-fit scenarios.
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Bhavesh Chauhan and Priyank Parashari have contributed equally to this work.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
