Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Ray Boosted Relic Neutrinos
Abstract
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) can boost relic neutrinos to high energies through Standard Model (SM) neutral-current interactions, providing an indirect probe of the cosmic neutrino background (CνB). In this work, we perform a systematic study of the diffuse UHECR-boosted CνB flux including elastic neutrino--nucleon scattering (ES), coherent elastic neutrino--nucleus scattering (COH), incoherent neutrino--nucleus scattering (INCOH), baryon-resonance production (RES), and deep inelastic scattering (DIS). For the UHECR flux, we use mixed-composition spectra obtained from the UHECR propagation code PriNCe and from the H3a and H4a implementations of the Hillas model, together with SFR, QSO, and GRB source evolution models. We find a clear hierarchy of scattering channels as a function of boosted neutrino energy. The coherent scattering dominates at low-energy neutrino flux for heavy nuclear components, while ES and INCOH become important once individual nucleons are resolved. The RES channel gives a non-negligible contribution in the high-energy region, and DIS appears only at the highest energies and is most visible for the H4a case. Using current IceCube and Pierre Auger Observatory data, we obtain upper limits on the CνB overdensity. Our results show that reliable predictions of the UHECR-boosted CνB signal require a combined treatment of the relevant SM scattering channels, UHECR composition, source evolution, and the neutrino mass spectrum.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026ultrahighenergy,
title = {{Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Ray Boosted Relic Neutrinos}},
author = {Jiajie Zhang and Jiajun Liao},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.18088},
eprint = {2606.18088},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18088},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Ray Boosted Relic Neutrinos
AU - Jiajie Zhang
AU - Jiajun Liao
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.18088
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18088
AB - Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) can boost relic neutrinos to high energies through Standard Model (SM) neutral-current interactions, providing an indirect probe of the cosmic neutrino background (CνB). In this work, we perform a systematic study of the diffuse UHECR-boosted CνB flux including elastic neutrino--nucleon scattering (ES), coherent elastic neutrino--nucleus scattering (COH), incoherent neutrino--nucleus scattering (INCOH), baryon-resonance production (RES), and deep inelastic scattering (DIS). For the UHECR flux, we use mixed-composition spectra obtained from the UHECR propagation code PriNCe and from the H3a and H4a implementations of the Hillas model, together with SFR, QSO, and GRB source evolution models. We find a clear hierarchy of scattering channels as a function of boosted neutrino energy. The coherent scattering dominates at low-energy neutrino flux for heavy nuclear components, while ES and INCOH become important once individual nucleons are resolved. The RES channel gives a non-negligible contribution in the high-energy region, and DIS appears only at the highest energies and is most visible for the H4a case. Using current IceCube and Pierre Auger Observatory data, we obtain upper limits on the CνB overdensity. Our results show that reliable predictions of the UHECR-boosted CνB signal require a combined treatment of the relevant SM scattering channels, UHECR composition, source evolution, and the neutrino mass spectrum.
ER -