Neutrino signals of lightcone fluctuations resulting from fluctuating space-time

Understand

One of the most common expectations of a quantum theory of gravity is that space-time is uncertain or fluctuating at microscopic scales, making it a stochastic medium for particle propagation.

• Particles traversing this space-time may experience fluctuations in travel times or velocities, together referred to as lightcone fluctuations, with even very small effects potentially accumulating into observable signals over large distances.
• In this work we present a heuristic model of lightcone fluctuations and study the resulting modifications to neutrino propagation, including neutrino decoherence and arrival time spread.
• We show the expected scale of such effects due to `natural' Planck scale physics and consider how they may be observed in neutrino detectors, and compare the potential of neutrinos to $\gamma$-ray astronomy.