Niels Bohr International Academy & Discovery Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP), The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Feb 1;122(4):041101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.041101.
Neutrinos are key to probing the deep structure of matter and the high-energy Universe. Yet, until recently, their interactions had only been measured at laboratory energies up to about 350 GeV. An opportunity to measure their interactions at higher energies opened up with the detection of high-energy neutrinos in IceCube, partially of astrophysical origin. Scattering off matter inside Earth affects the distribution of their arrival directions-from this, we extract the neutrino-nucleon cross section at energies from 18 TeV to 2 PeV, in four energy bins, in spite of uncertainties in the neutrino flux. Using six years of public IceCube High-Energy Starting Events, we explicitly show for the first time that the energy dependence of the cross section above 18 TeV agrees with the predicted softer-than-linear dependence, and reaffirm the absence of new physics that would make the cross section rise sharply, up to a center-of-mass energy sqrt[s]≈1 TeV.
中微子是探究物质深层结构和高能宇宙的关键。然而，直到最近，它们的相互作用仅在实验室能量高达约 350GeV 的情况下进行了测量。随着在 IceCube 中探测到高能中微子的机会的出现，这种情况发生了变化，其中部分中微子具有天体物理起源。中微子在地球内部物质中的散射会影响它们到达方向的分布——从中，我们在四个能量-bin 中提取了能量在 18TeV 到 2PeV 之间的中微子-核子截面，尽管在中微子通量中存在不确定性。使用六年的公共 IceCube 高能量起始事件，我们首次明确表明，在 18TeV 以上的截面的能量依赖性与预测的软于线性的依赖性一致，并再次确认不存在会使截面急剧上升的新物理，直到质心能量 sqrt[s]≈1TeV。
