Detection of Ultra High Energy Neutrinos via Coherent Radio Emission

• Main Authors: G. S. Varner, M. Rosen, B. Stokes, J. M. Clem, J. J. Beatty, R. Nichol, K. Palladino, S. W. Barwick, D. Goldstein, J. Nam, A. Silvestri, F. Wu, A. Connolly, S. Hoover, D. Saltzberg, D. Besson, K. M. Liewer, C. J. Naudet, B. Cai, M. A. Duvernois, E. Lusczek, P. Chen, K. Reil
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.410.5518; http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/11750/slac-pub-11872.pdf

Since the 1960’s it has been predicted that cosmic ray protons of the highest energies must produce corresponding high energy neutrinos due to collisions with the cosmic microwave background. Both the origin and mechanism for production of these protons remain a mystery. Detection of the neutrinos, which remain unaffected by poorly-constrained galactic and inter-galactic magnetic fields, provide a useful new astronomical observation window. Moreover, Askyaryan pointed out that detection of these neutrinos via induced showers in solid, radio transparent media, would be observable at large distances due to the coherenence of the radio emission. However, more than four decades later none of these predicted events have been observed. This has been due in part to the need for enormous target volumes and cost-effective ways to instrument them. Without being able to either trigger or record such transient signals in an efficient manner, detection remains elusive. We present a high-performance, cost-effective and low-power solution to this detection problem. Low-power is needed for balloon-borne detection, and this work was done in the context of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna