Superheavy Particle Origin of IceCube PeV Neutrino Events

Understand

We interpret the PeV shower events observed by the IceCube collaboration as an s-channel enhancement of neutrino-quark scattering by a leptoquark that couples to the tau-flavor and light quarks.

• With a leptoquark mass of ~ 0.6 TeV and a steep 1/E^{2.3} neutrino flux, charged-current scattering gives shower events at ~ 1 PeV and neutral-current scattering gives shower events at ~ 0.5 PeV.
• This mechanism is also consistent with the paucity of muon-track events above 100 TeV.