Events on Friday, March 23rd, 2018
- Physics Department Colloquium
- Discovering the Highest Energy Neutrinos Using a Radio Phased Array
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Abigail Vieregg, University of Chicago
- Abstract: Ultra-high energy neutrino astronomy sits at the boundary between particle physics and astrophysics. The detection of the highest energy neutrinos would be an important step toward understanding the most energetic cosmic accelerators and would enable tests of fundamental physics at energy scales that cannot easily be achieved on Earth. IceCube has detected astrophysical neutrinos at lower energies, and at higher energies the best limits to date on the flux comes from IceCube and the ANITA experiment, a NASA balloon-borne radio telescope designed to detect coherent radio Cherenkov emission from cosmogenic ultra-high energy neutrinos. The future of high energy neutrino detection lies with ground-based radio arrays like ARA, which would represent an large leap in sensitivity. I will discuss a new radio phased array design that will improve sensitivity enormously and could push the energy threshold for radio detection down to overlap with the energy range probed by IceCube.
- Host: Albrecht Karle