Decoherence in neutrino propagation through matter, and bounds from IceCube/DeepCore

Understand

We revisit neutrino oscillations in matter considering the open quantum system framework which allows to introduce possible decoherence effects generated by New Physics in a phenomenological manner.

• We assume that the decoherence parameters $\gamma_{ij}$ may depend on the neutrino energy, as $\gamma_{ij}=\gamma_{ij}^{0}(E/\text{GeV})^n$ $(n = 0,\pm1,\pm2) $.
• The case of non-uniform matter is studied in detail, both within the adiabatic approximation and in the more general non-adiabatic case.
• In particular, we develop a consistent formalism to study the non-adiabatic case dividing the matter profile into an arbitrary number of layers of constant densities.