Initial Results from the ANITA 2006-2007 Balloon Flight

• Main Authors: P. W. Gorham, P. Allison, S. W. Barwick, J. J. Beatty, D. Z. Besson, W. R. Binns, C. Chen, P. Chen, J. M. Clem, A. Connolly, P. F. Dowkontt, M. A. Duvernois, R. C. Field, D. Goldstein, A. Goodhue, C. Hast, C. L. Hebert, S. Hoover, M. H. Israel, J. Kowalski, J. G. Learned, K. M. Liewer, J. T. Link, E. Lusczek, S. Matsuno, B. C. Mercurio, C. Miki, J. Nam, C. J. Naudet, J. Ng, R. J. Nichol, K. Palladino, K. Reil, A. Romero-wolf, M. Rosen, L. Ruckman, D. Saltzberg, D. Seckel, G. S. Varner, D. Walz, Y. Wang, F. Wu
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.589.317; http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/14750/slac-pub-14759.pdf

Abstract. We report initial results of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) 2006-2007 Long Duration Balloon flight, which searched for evidence of the flux of cosmogenic neutrinos. ANITA flew for 35 days looking for radio impulses that might be due to the Askaryan effect in neutrino-induced electromagnetic showers within the Antarctic ice sheets. In our initial high-threshold robust analysis, no neutrino candidates are seen, with no physics background. In a non-signal horizontal-polarization channel, we do detect 6 events consistent with radio impulses from extensive air showers, which helps to validate the effectiveness of our method. Upper limits derived from our analysis now begin to eliminate the highest cosmogenic neutrino models. 1.