Probing heavy sterile neutrinos at neutrino telescopes via the dipole portal

Abstract

The question of how heavy a sterile neutrino can be probed in experiments leads us to investigate the Primakoff production of heavy sterile neutrinos from ultrahigh-energy neutrinos via the magnetic dipole portal. Despite the suppression from the small magnetic moment, the transition is significantly enhanced by tiny t-channel momentum transfers, similar to the resonant production of pions and axions in an external electromagnetic field. Based on the current IceCube measurement of astrophysical neutrinos up to PeV energies, strong constraints can already be derived on the transition magnetic moments of sterile neutrinos up to TeV masses. Moreover, we investigate the sensitivity of future tau neutrino telescopes, which are designed for EeV cosmogenic neutrino detection. We find that sterile neutrino masses as large as 30TeV can be probed at tau neutrino telescopes such as GRAND, POEMMA, and Trinity.