In a new paper, I place new limits on the lifetime of the nu_1 and nu_2 neutrinos, assuming they decay into a visible nu_3, in the inverted neutrino mass ordering:

New limits on neutrino decay from the Glashow resonance of high-energy cosmic neutrinos
Mauricio Bustamante
arXiv: 2004.06844

To place my new limts, I put to practice a proposal that we published earlier (1610.02096), that uses the observation of the Glashow resonance in IceCube, at a few PeV, as evidence of the survival of nu_1 and nu_2.

I base our present-day results on the observation of the first Glashow resonance candidate by IceCube.  For nu_2, the limit on the lifetime is the best one to date.  For nu_1, it is comparable to the best one to date, coming from solar neutrinos.  The limits quickly improve with just a handful more of Glashow resonances observed.

I am currently looking to hire one PhD student to work with me on high-energy cosmic neutrino physics at the Niels Bohr Institute starting in Fall of 2020.

This is a 3-year position, fully funded by the Villum Fonden program “Pushing neutrino physics to the cosmic frontier.”

Find more details on INSPIRE: https://labs.inspirehep.net/jobs/1781913 .

Application deadline: April 15, 2020

Contact me if you have any questions.

Recently I was interviewed by El Comercio, the largest national newspaper in Perú, about neutrinos, particles physics, and my Villum Young Investigator grant.  The interview appeared online and in print form on February 22, 2020.  Here is a link to the online version (in Spanish):

Peruano recibe US$15 millones para estudiar los vacíos de la física de partículas

Weirdly, the interview made it to the front page of the print version of newspaper:

 

PuntoEdu, the news portal of PUCP, my old uni in Lima, kindly interviewed me on occasion of the Villum Young Investigator Award.  Here is the link to the article, in Spanish:

El físico PUCP Mauricio Bustamante recibe US$ 1.5 millones para investigar en instituto de la Universidad de Copenhague

I was recently awarded a Villum Fonden Young Investigator Award (in the amount of ~10M DKK ~= 1.3M euro) to carry out the project “Pushing Neutrino Physics to the Cosmic Frontier”.

This starting grant will allow me to form my own research group at the Niels Bohr Institute, and to fund it for the coming five years. Come Fall 2020, I will become Assistant Professor at the NBI.

More information: https://www.nbi.ku.dk/english/namely_names/2020/three-young-scientists-from-nbi-receive-villum-young-investigator-grants/

Using high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, with TeV-PeV energies, we have placed limits on secret neutrino-neutrino interactions for mediator masses in the 1-100 MeV range.

While propagating to Earth, high-energy astrophysical neutrinos may interact resonantly with the cosmic neutrino background.  This would introduce a gap in the energy spectrum of the high-energy neutrinos.  We looked for this gap in 6 years of publicly available IceCube High Energy Starting Events (HESE).

Bounds on secret neutrino interactions from high-energy astrophysical neutrinos
Mauricio Bustamante, Charlotte Amalie Rosenstroem, Shashank Shalgar, Irene Tamborra

This complements our earlier work (1912.09115), which used supernova neutrinos to place limits on secret interactions, both from neutrino interactions inside the supernova core and from the propagation of neutrinos to Earth (these are the regions labeled “Shashank et al.” in the plot above).

Our paper on new limits on new, secret, neutrino-neutrino interactions beyond the Standard Model from core-collapse supernovae is out:

Core-collapse supernovae stymie secret neutrino interactions (1912.09115)
Shashank Shalgar, Irene Tamborra, Mauricio Bustamante

We find limits on the mass and coupling of the new mediator through which the secret interactions occur.  For mediator masses between 10 MeV and 15 GeV, our limits are the strongest to date.  For mediator masses above 100 MeV, our limits are the first.

On occasion of the upcoming appearance of the GRAND white paper in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, we wrote a press release for the EurekAlert! news service of the AAAS:

Giant neutrino telescope to open window to ultra-high-energy universe

Also, GRAND made the cover of the February 2020 issue of the journal:

The flavor composition of high-energy cosmic neutrinos has long been recognized as a rich probe of particle physics and astrophysics.  We are rapidly making progress in measuring the flavor composition with higher precision.

To take stock of the present situation and of things to come, I chose what I think are some of the most interesting flavor-related questions, and laid them out according to when we will answer them and how easy it will be to answer them.  (Of course, there is some subjectivity involved in where the questions are place.)

Fore more information about the status and future prospects of flavor composition, see my recent talk at PAHEN: Flavor in high-energy cosmic neutrinos: Interpretation and new challenges.

There is vast potential to test new physics with high-energy cosmic neutrinos, and the community has started doing it.  As a way to help guide our collective efforts, we came up with a classification scheme of new-physics models:

The scheme classifies models according to the stages of the neutrino lifetime at which they may act — at production, during propagation, at detection — and what observables they may affect — energy spectrum, arrival directions, flavor composition, arrival times.

(The list of models above is representative, not exhaustive.)

For more information see:

• ICRC 2019 proceedings: Fundamental physics with high-energy cosmic neutrinos today and in the future (1907.08690), Carlos A. Argüelles, Mauricio Bustamante, Ali Kheirandish, Sergio Palomares-Ruiz, Jordi Salvado, Aaron C. Vincent

• My ICRC 2019 slides (click here)