Abstract
Neutrino oscillations at the highest energies and longest baselines can be used to study the structure of spacetime and test the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. If the metric of spacetime has a quantum mechanical description, its fluctuations at the Planck scale are expected to introduce non-unitary effects that are inconsistent with the standard unitary time evolution of quantum mechanics. Neutrinos interacting with such fluctuations would lose their quantum coherence, deviating from the expected oscillatory flavour composition at long distances and high energies. Here we use atmospheric neutrinos detected by the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory in the energy range of 0.5–10.0 TeV to search for coherence loss in neutrino propagation. We find no evidence of anomalous neutrino decoherence and determine limits on neutrino–quantum gravity interactions. The constraint on the effective decoherence strength parameter within an energy-independent decoherence model improves on previous limits by a factor of 30. For decoherence effects scaling as E2, our limits are advanced by more than six orders of magnitude beyond past measurements compared with the state of the art.
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Data availability
A list of selected event energies and zenith angles, a Monte Carlo simulation set and information on systematic uncertainty effects, along with other public IceCube data releases, are available at https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/data-releases/.
Code availability
IceCube maintains an open-source repository of software tools for handling the IceCube data at https://github.com/IceCubeOpenSource. We also include scripts for handling the public data within the data release at https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/data-releases/.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge support from the following sources, grouped by country. United States: US National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs; US National Science Foundation, Physics Division; US National Science Foundation, EPSCoR; US National Science Foundation, Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Open Science Grid (OSG), Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh), Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), Frontera computing project at the Texas Advanced Computing Center; US Department of Energy, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Particle Astrophysics Research Computing Center at the University of Maryland; Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research at Michigan State University; Astroparticle Physics Computational Facility at Marquette University; NVIDIA Corporation; and Google Cloud Platform. Belgium: Funds for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS and FWO), FWO Odysseus and Big Science programmes and Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (Belspo). Germany: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Helmholtz Alliance for Astroparticle Physics (HAP), Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association, Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY), and High Performance Computing cluster of the RWTH Aachen. Sweden: Swedish Research Council, Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. European Union: EGI Advanced Computing for Research. Australia: Australian Research Council. Canada: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Calcul Québec, Compute Ontario, Canada Foundation for Innovation, WestGrid and Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Denmark: Villum Fonden, Carlsberg Foundation and European Commission. New Zealand: Marsden Fund. Japan: Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) and Institute for Global Prominent Research (IGPR) of Chiba University. Korea: National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF). Switzerland: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
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The IceCube Collaboration acknowledges significant contributions to this manuscript by the IceCube groups from the University of Texas at Arlington, the Niels Bohr Institute and Harvard University. The IceCube Collaboration designed, constructed and now operates the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Data processing and calibration, Monte Carlo simulations of the detector and of the theoretical models, and data analyses were performed by a large number of collaboration members, who also discussed and approved the scientific results presented here.
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Nature Physics thanks Ricardo A. Gomes, Atsuko Ichikawa and Giuseppe Gaetano Luciano for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Extended data
Extended Data Fig. 1 Systematic Pulls for Phase Perturbation (top) and State Selection (bottom).
The pull is defined as the value of the nuisance parameter minus its central value, divided by the Gaussian prior width. Each of the nuisance parameters (outlined in the Methods section) is represented by four color bars, one corresponding to the best fit point under each power law n. Since the best fit point is very close to no decoherence in all power law models, the distributionsof pulls are similar in all cases.
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The IceCube Collaboration. Search for decoherence from quantum gravity with atmospheric neutrinos. Nat. Phys. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02436-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02436-w