Exploring a nonminimal sterile neutrino model involving decay at IceCube

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of neutrino decay together with neutrino oscillations in the context of eV-scale sterile neutrinos. We review the formalism of visible neutrino decay in which one of the decay products is a neutrino that potentially can be observed. We apply the formalism developed for decay to the recent sterile neutrino search performed by IceCube with TeV neutrinos. We show that for a ν₄ lifetime τ₄/m₄≲10⁻¹eV⁻¹⁶ s, the interpretation of the high-energy IceCube analysis can be significantly changed.