Visible inelasticity as a probe of tau flavor content of astrophysical neutrinos

Abstract

Astrophysical neutrinos provide a unique probe of neutrino flavor changes over cosmological baselines. While the tau component of the neutrino flux is expected to arise almost entirely from mixing, current measurements rely primarily on rare double-cascade signatures. We investigate a complementary method to measure the tau fraction using the visible inelasticity of starting track events in neutrino telescopes. Muonic decays of tau leptons produce tracks with systematically larger visible inelasticity than those from muon neutrino interactions, potentially enabling statistical separation of the two flavors. Using realistic IceCube exposures and detector performance, we show that this observable already yields competitive sensitivity to the tau-to-muon flux ratio, $R_{\tau\mu}$, achievable with existing data. This approach may further enable flavor measurements of individual sources and the selection of tau-enhanced source catalogs. Starting-track inelasticity thus provides a powerful and immediately accessible probe of astrophysical neutrino flavor and of potential physics beyond standard neutrino mixing.