Towards Radio Searches for the Highest-Energy Tau Neutrinos with BEACON

ORAL

Abstract

When ultrahigh energy tau neutrinos skim the Earth, the tau leptons they produce can exit the Earth and produce extensive air showers in the atmosphere. The Beamforming Elevated Array for COsmic Neutrinos (BEACON) is a novel detector concept consisting of many radio interferometers placed on mountaintops, designed to detect the radio emission of these upgoing extensive air showers. The prototype is located at the White Mountain Research Station in California and consists of a phased array of 4 custom crossed-dipole antennas with a 30-80 MHz bandwidth. A goal of the prototype is the detection of cosmic rays, whose well known flux will allow us to estimate the sensitivity of a full-size BEACON to ultrahigh energy neutrinos. In this talk, we discuss the current status of the BEACON prototype, a recent calibration campaign using a drone, and the ongoing cosmic ray search.

*This work is supported by National Science Foundation Awards # 2033500, 1752922, 1607555, PHY-2012980, & DGE-1746045 as well as the Sloan Foundation, the RSCA, the Bill and Linda Frost Fund at the California Polytechnic State University, USA, and National Aeronautics and Space Agency (support through JPL and Caltech as well as Award # 80NSSC18K0231). This work has received financial support from Xunta de Galicia, Spain (Centro singular de investigación de Galicia accreditation 2019–2022), by European Union ERDF, by the ''María de Maeztu'' Units of Excellence program MDM-2016-0692, the Spanish Research State Agency and from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain PID2019-105544GB-I00 and RED2018-102661-T (RENATA). We thank the NSF-funded White Mountain Research Station for their support and in particular Steven DeVanzo, Jeremiah Eanes, and all of the staff at Barcroft and Crooked Creek Stations. Computing resources were provided by the University of Chicago Research Computing Cen

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Publication: D. Southall et al., Design and initial performance of the prototype for the BEACON instrument for detection of ultrahigh energy particles, Nuclear Inst. and Methods in Physics Research, A 1048 (2023) 167889

Presenters

  • Andrew J Zeolla

    • Pennsylvania State University

Authors

  • Andrew J Zeolla

    • Pennsylvania State University