Collaborative Research: MRI-R2 Instrument Development of the Askaryan Radio Array, a Large-scale Radio Cherenkov Detector at the

• Main Authors: South Pole, Intellectual Merit
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.588.2671; http://grid.ntu.edu.tw/html/projects/pro101/pro101.pdf

One of the most tantalizing questions in astronomy and astrophysics, namely the origin and the evolution of the cosmic accelerators that produce the highest energy (UHE) cosmic rays, may be best addressed through the observation of UHE cosmogenic neutrinos. Neutrinos travel from their source undeflected by magnetic fields and unimpeded by interactions with the cosmic microwave background. However, uncertainties in their predicted fluxes of make it difficult to design an array with sufficient sensitivity to collect a statistically meaningful sample of events. At high energies (above 1015 eV), neutrinos could be most efficiently detected in dense, radio frequency (RF) transparent media via the Askaryan effect. The abundant cold ice covering the geographic South Pole, with its exceptional RF clarity, has been host to several pioneering efforts to develop this approach, including RICE and ANITA. Building on the expertise gained in these efforts, and the infrastructure developed in the construc-tion of the IceCube optical Cherenkov observatory, we propose to develop an array, known as ARA (The Askaryan Radio Array), and install it in the deep ice near the geographical South Pole. South Polar ice is, in fact, perhaps the most extensively-studied on the planet; the combination of ice thickness and fa-vorable radiofrequency dielectric characteristics, as well as the excellent scientific infrastructure and the co-location of the IceCube Observatory, makes that site unparalleled for this study. With a fiducial area of