Prompt TeV-PeV atmospheric neutrino window

Costa, C. G. S.; Halzen, F.; Salles, C.

doi:10.1103/physrevd.66.113002

Cited by 14 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This reduces to . (110) Note that this result is for a typical, but fairly distant source. A nearby line-emitting blazar could be a strong candidate for neutrino observation.…”

Section: Moderately Shocked Protons: Tev Blazar Neutrinosmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…This cosmogenic flux is among the most likely sources of high-energy neutrinos, and the most straightforward to predict. Furthermore, cosmic rays interact with the Earth's atmosphere [109,110] and with the hydrogen concentrated in the galactic plane [46,47,111,112,113] producing high-energy neutrinos.…”

Section: Cosmic Neutrino Sources a A List Of Cosmic Neutrino Somentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

High-energy neutrino astronomy: the cosmic ray connection

2002

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This is a review of neutrino astronomy anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of 10 20 and 10 13 eV, respectively.Although the discovery of cosmic rays dates back close to a century, we do not know how and where they are accelerated. There is evidence that the highest energy cosmic rays are extra-galactic -they cannot be contained by our galaxy's magnetic field anyway because their gyroradius far exceeds its dimension. Elementary elementary-particle physics dictates a universal upper limit on their energy of 5 × 10 19 eV, the so-called Greisen-Kuzmin-Zatsepin cutoff; however, particles in excess of this energy have been observed by all experiments, adding one more puzzle to the cosmic ray mystery. Mystery is fertile ground for progress: we will review the facts as well as the speculations about the sources.There is a realistic hope that the oldest problem in astronomy will be resolved soon by ambitious experimentation: air shower arrays of 10 4 km 2 area, arrays of air Cerenkov detectors and, the subject of this review, kilometer-scale neutrino observatories.We will review why cosmic accelerators are also expected to be cosmic beam dumps producing associated high-energy photon and neutrino beams. We will work in detail through an example of a cosmic beam dump, gamma ray bursts. These are expected to produce neutrinos from MeV to EeV energy by a variety of mechanisms. We will also discuss active galaxies and GUT-scale remnants, two other classes of sources speculated to be associated with the highest energy cosmic rays. Gamma ray bursts and active galaxies are also the sources of the highest energy gamma rays, with emission observed up to 20 TeV, possibly higher. The important conclusion is that, independently of the specific blueprint of the source, it takes a kilometer-scale neutrino observatory to detect the neutrino beam associated with the highest energy cosmic rays and gamma rays. We also briefly review the ongoing efforts to commission such instrumentation. Contents

show abstract

“…This reduces to . (110) Note that this result is for a typical, but fairly distant source. A nearby line-emitting blazar could be a strong candidate for neutrino observation.…”

Section: Moderately Shocked Protons: Tev Blazar Neutrinosmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Cosmic Neutrino Sources a A List Of Cosmic Neutrino Somentioning

confidence: 99%

High-energy neutrino astronomy: the cosmic ray connection

2002

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These have been chosen mostly for illustrative purposes. The panel labeled charm refers to maximal predictions of neutrinos from the decay of charmed particles produced by cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere [15]. The W-B refers to the Waxman and Bahcall (W-B) limit on the neutrino flux from astrophysical sources that are optically thin to proton-photon and proton-proton interactions.…”

Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phenomenology of High-Energy Neutrinos in Low-Scale Quantum-Gravity Models

2001

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We show that neutrino telescopes, optimized for detecting neutrinos of TeV to PeV energy, can reveal threshold effects associated with TeV-scale gravity. The signature is an increase with energy of the cross section beyond what is predicted by the Standard Model. The advantage of the method is that the neutrino cross section is measured in an energy region where i) the models are characteristically distinguishable and ii) the Standard Model neutrino cross section can be reliably calculated so that any deviation can be conclusively identified. 04.50.+h, 99.55.Vj, 95.85.Ry, 98.54.Cm, 98.70.Rz Motivated by the absence of a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity and the unresolved hierarchy problem between the electroweak scale (10 2 GeV) and the Planck scale (10 19 GeV), a great deal of attention has been given to theories of low-scale quantum gravity which envision significant quantum gravity effects at an energy scale of the order of M s ∼ 1 TeV [1,2]. In these scenarios, potentially large effects on high energy processes may occur due to the contributions from, e.g., Kaluza-Klein excitations of gravitons (KK) or other stringy states near M s . An interesting motivation for models in which cross sections at TeV scale become enhanced is the ultra-high energy cosmic ray problem. Protons above the GZK cutoff (∼ 10 19 eV) interact with the cosmic microwave background cataclysmically by the ∆-resonance [3,4]. Thus, the cosmic ray events observed above this energy must be produced by local sources, or involve new physics. Local sources of particles of such energy being unlikely, many exotic solutions have been proposed [5]. A solution which has received a great deal of attention in recent literature proposes that neutrinos with enhanced cross sections at GZK energies constitute the highest energy cosmic rays [6][7][8]. This solution requires neutrino-nucleon cross sections on the scale of 10's of mbarnes. Unfortunately, most scenarios of low-scale quantum gravity as low-energy effective theories are valid only up to the order of < ∼ M s . Above this scale, the naive calculations typically violate unitarity [6,7]. One has to introduce some ad hoc unitarization scheme, since the fundamental theory, such as a realistic string theory, is yet unavailable. It is also very difficult to reliably predict the parton distribution functions needed at GZK energies in neutrino-nucleon interactions. For these reasons, studies of ultra-high energy (∼ 10 20 eV) quantum gravity enhancements to neutrinonucleon interactions are extremely speculative.These problems are far more manageable at energies below or near M s . Unitarity may not be violated at this scale, calculations are generally perturbative and the relevant parton distributions are known at these energies [9]. The characteristics for different theoretical models can be also qualitatively distinguishable near and slightly above the threshold. Therefore, the TeV regime provides a natural scale for probing the features of low-scale quantum gravity models. These tests includ...

show abstract

“…We refer to Refs. [26,30,31] for a detailed discussion on this topic and we will comment in Sect. 5 on possible implication of this uncertainties on DM searches.…”

Section: Backgroundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Downward-going tau neutrinos as a new prospect of detecting dark matter

Fornengo

Niro

2011

J. High Energ. Phys.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Dark matter trapped in the Sun produces a flux of all flavors of neutrinos, which then reach the Earth after propagating out of the Sun and oscillating from the production point to the detector. The typical signal which is looked at refers to the muon neutrino component and consists of a flux of up-going muons in a neutrino detector, the major source of background being atmospheric neutrinos. We propose instead a novel signature, namely the possibility of looking at the tau neutrino component of the dark matter signal, which is almost background-free in the downward-going direction, since the tau neutrino amount in atmospheric neutrinos is negligible and in the down-going baseline atmospheric muon-neutrinos have no time to sizably oscillate. We analyze the prospects of studying the downward-going tau neutrinos from dark matter annihilation (or decay) in the Sun in Cherenkov detectors, by looking at hadronic showers produced in the charged-current tau neutrino interactions and subsequent tau decay. We discuss the various sources of background (namely the small tau neutrino component in atmospheric neutrinos, both from direct production and from oscillations; tau neutrinos from solar corona interactions; the galactic tau neutrino component) as well as sources of background due to misidentification of electron and muon events. We find that the downward-going tau neutrinos signal has potentially very good prospects for Mton scale Cherenkov detectors, the main limitation being the level of misidentification of non-tau events, which need to be kept at level of percent. Several tens of events per year (depending on the dark matter mass and annihilation/decay channel) are potentially collectible with a Mton scale detector, and a 5 σ significance discovery is potentially reachable for dark matter masses in the range from 20 to 300 GeV with a few years of exposure on a Mton detector.

show abstract

Prompt TeV-PeV atmospheric neutrino window

Cited by 14 publications

References 40 publications

High-energy neutrino astronomy: the cosmic ray connection

High-energy neutrino astronomy: the cosmic ray connection

Phenomenology of High-Energy Neutrinos in Low-Scale Quantum-Gravity Models

Downward-going tau neutrinos as a new prospect of detecting dark matter

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About