Comprehensive estimate of the sensitivity of ANITA to tau neutrinos

• Published in: Proceedings of 36th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2019)
• Main Authors: Wissel, Stephanie, Burch, Claire, Carvalho, Washington, Crowley, Joe, Alvarez-Muñiz, Jaime, Cummings, Austin, Kauther, Abdulrahman, Romero-Wolf, Andrés, Schoorlemmer, Harm, Zas, Enrique
• Other Authors: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA USA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasedena, CA USA;, Harvard College, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA USA;, California Institute of Technology, Pasedena, CA USA;, Departamento de Fsica, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil;, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA USA;, Departamento de Física de Partículas & Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías, Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, Spain;, Gran Sasso Science Institute, School of Advanced Studies, L'Aquila, Italy;, Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: Sissa Medialab [e-mail] 2019
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10754/679494; https://doi.org/10.22323/1.358.1034

Two anomalous events have been reported by the ANITA collaboration that are observationally consistent with air showers from a particle emerging from the Antarctic ice. One possible interpretation of these events is that they are due to tau neutrinos interacting in the Earth, resulting in an air shower initiated by a tau lepton decay. We present a comprehensive study of the sensitivity of ANITA to tau neutrinos, using the expected Standard Model cross-sections and tau lepton energy losses, varied ice thicknesses, and radio emission simulation of upgoing tau showers with ZHAireS. ANITA-IV was supported through NASA grant NNX15AC24G. Computing resources for this project were provided by the Research Computing Center at the University of Chicago and the UCLA Institute for Digital Research & Education. We gratefully acknowledge NSF CAREER awards 1752922 & 1255557, the CSU’s Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities Grant Program, the KAUST Gifted Student Program, the Cosmology and Astroparticle Student and Postdoc Exchange Network (CASPEN), the Leverhulme Trust, Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) under its Vanguard Program 106-2119-M-002-011, and the Min-isterio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (FPA2017-85114-P and María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence MDM-2016-0692) and the Xunta de Galicia (ED431C 2017/07).