The intrinsic and oscillated astrophysical neutrino flavor ratios

Abstract

The pp interactions taking place in the cosmos around us are a source of the astrophysical neutrinos of all the three flavors. In these interactions, the electron and the muon neutrinos mainly come from the production and the decay of the π^{\pm} mesons, whereas the tau neutrinos mainly come from the production and the decay of the D^{\pm}_{S} mesons. We estimate the three intrinsic neutrino flavor ratios for 1 GeV < E < 10^{12} GeV in the pp interactions and found them to be 1 : 2 : 3\times 10^{-5}. We study the effects of neutrino oscillations on these intrinsic ratios. We point out that the three ratios become 1 : 1 : 1 if L(pc)/E(GeV)> 10^{-10} in the presence of neutrino oscillations, where L is the distance to the astrophysical neutrino source in units of parsecs.

23 pages, 5 figures, typos corrected, appeared in Mod. Phys. Lett. A