English

An Andean Deep-Valley Detector for High-Energy Tau Neutrinos

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2020-02-18 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

High-energy astrophysical neutrinos, recently discovered by IceCube up to energies of several PeV, opened a new window to the high-energy Universe. Yet much remains to be known. IceCube has excellent muon flavor identification, but tau flavor identification is challenging. This limits its ability to probe neutrino physics and astrophysics. To address this limitation, we present a concept for a large-scale observatory of astrophysical tau neutrinos in the 1-100 PeV range, where a flux is guaranteed to exist. Its detection would allow us to characterize the neutrino sources observed by IceCube, to discover new ones, and test neutrino physics at high energies. The deep-valley air-shower array concept that we present provides highly background-suppressed neutrino detection with pointing resolution <1 degree, allowing us to begin the era of high-energy tau-neutrino astronomy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.06475,
  title  = {An Andean Deep-Valley Detector for High-Energy Tau Neutrinos},
  author = {Andres Romero-Wolf and Jaime Alvarez-Muñiz and Washington R. Carvalho and Austin Cummings and Harm Schoorlemmer and Stephanie Wissel and Enrique Zas and Carlos Argüelles and Horacio Barreda and Jose Bazo and Jose Bellido and Mauricio Bustamante and Alberto Gago and Rolando Perca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.06475},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

15 pages, 6 figures, white paper submitted to the Latin American Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure (LASF4RI)