Cosmic neutrino background absorption line in the neutrino spectrum at IceCube

The IceCube experiment has recently reported a high energy neutrino spectrum between the TeV and PeV scales. The observed neutrino flux can be as a whole well fitted by a simple power law of the neutrino energy Eν, Eν-γν (γν≃2). As a notable feature of the spectrum, however, it has a gap between 500 TeV and 1 PeV. Although the existence of the gap in the neutrino spectrum is not statistically significant at this point, it is very enticing to ask whether it might hint at some physics beyond the Standard Model. In this paper, we investigate a possibility that the gap can be interpreted as an absorption line in the power-law spectrum by the cosmic neutrino background through a new resonance in the MeV range. We also show that the absorption line has rich information about not only the MeV scale new particle but also the neutrino masses as well as the distances to the astrophysical sources of the high energy neutrinos. Viable models to achieve this possibility are also discussed.