In next-generation neutrino water and ice Cherenkov telescopes, game-changing algorithms will be required to advance our understanding of astrophysical neutrinos, as well as neutrino oscillation properties.
Most astrophysical neutrinos arrive with energies below the TeV scale, whereby event flavour identification is challenging.
Notably, distinguishing cascades from $\nu_\tau$ interactions versus $\nu_e$ becomes tenuous due to the short length scale propagation of the outgoing $\tau$ lepton. Furthermore, muons produce dimmer tracks at these energies as they minimally ionise during their propagation.
Hence, dedicated techniques are required in an attempt to extract neutrino flavour information for such sub-TeV events.
Interestingly, hadronic cascades produced in $\nu_\tau$ interactions are expected to yield more neutrons than $\nu_e$ or $\nu_\mu$. These neutrons are then eventually captured by ice molecules, emitting a delayed $2.2~\mathrm{MeV}~\gamma$ emission at least $O(100~\mu \mathrm{s})$ after the prompt photon emission.
In this investigation, we analyse simulated event distributions from neutron captures on ice molecules.
We report key features of neutron capture events, their timing distributions and expected light yields as a function of energy, and discuss their potential impact to distinguish $\nu_{\tau}$ events from $\nu_e$ events.