Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2026 Sabrina Hanning. All rights reserved. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may only be used for non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. For all other uses, including reproduction and distribution, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Physics & Astronomy Department

First Advisor

Jeffrey Hyde

Abstract

Neutrinos are the ideal subject for theories of Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics. This is because small neutrino interaction cross-sections make them incredibly difficult to detect and result in many open questions regarding neutrino properties, particularly those that do not fit nicely into the Standard Model of particle physics, such as the existence of neutrino masses. BSM neutrino self-interactions are an interesting possibility with connections to dark matter candidates, neutrino mass generation, and in general any measurement that relies on accurate modeling of incident astrophysical neutrino flux.

These self-interactions may take various forms, with different mediator particles; we present a model of an interaction mediated by a massive scalar particle. We then attempt to constrain this model by comparing modeled point source fluxes from TXS 0506 + 056 and NGC 1068 to the flux detected by IceCube in a joint analysis. We find little improvement in constraints from previous works that have considered these sources separately [16]. We finally present ongoing work to include the diffuse astrophysical flux of neutrinos in such an analysis which will hopefully yield stronger constraints.

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