Observability of Earth-Skimming Ultrahigh Energy Neutrinos

2001/05/31 by Jonathan L. Feng, Peter Fisher, Frank Wilczek +1 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #astro-ph #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.88.161102

published as Phys.Rev.Lett. 88 (2002) 161102 · 4 pages, 3 figures

openalex publication_date 2002/04/04 · arxiv created 2002/04/19 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Neutrinos with energies above 10(8) GeV are expected from cosmic ray interactions with the microwave background and are predicted in many speculative models. Such energetic neutrinos are difficult to detect, as they are shadowed by Earth, but rarely interact in the atmosphere. Here we propose a novel detection strategy: Earth-skimming neutrinos convert to charged leptons that escape Earth, and these leptons are detected in ground level fluorescence detectors. With the existing HiRes detector, neutrinos from some proposed sources are marginally detectable, and improvements of 2 orders of magnitude are possible at the proposed Telescope Array.

Citations

• High-energy neutrino astronomy

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