Pioneering an Array-Wide Search for Ultra-high Energy Neutrinos with the Askaryan Radio Array

ORAL

Abstract

The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) at the South Pole is conducting the first array-wide search for ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos using radio detection in glacial ice. Spanning five autonomous stations and nearly thirty station-years of exposure, this analysis unifies ARA's entire dataset within a new end-to-end framework, AraProc, which performs all aspects of waveform processing, event reconstruction, background identification and rejection, and analysis variable computation in a consistent, scalable way. Enhanced detector simulations incorporating data-driven noise, antenna gain models, and multi-station neutrino propagation via NuLeptonSim and AraSim have yielded the most realistic effective-volume calculations yet achieved for ARA. Using a blinded 10% dataset, the optimized pipeline demonstrates order-of-magnitude improvements in thermal and continuous-wave background suppression and achieves the highest projected sensitivity of any in-ice radio experiment above 3 EeV. The forthcoming unblinding of the full dataset will yield the first neutrino candidates ever seen by ARA, and by any in-ice radio experiment. Alternatively, it will establish the most stringent flux limits to date, marking a milestone for next-generation experiments such as RNO-G and IceCube-Gen2 Radio.

*The ARA Collaboration is grateful to support from the National Science Foundation through Award 2013134. The ARA Collaboration designed, constructed, and now operates the ARA detectors. We would like to thank IceCube, and specifically the winterovers for the support in operating the detector. Data processing and calibration, Monte Carlo simulations of the detector and of theoretical models and data analyses were performed by a large number of collaboration members, who also discussed and approved the scientific results presented here. We are thankful to Antarctic Support Contractor staff, a Leidos unit for field support and enabling our work on the harshest continent. We thank the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs and Physics Division for funding support. We further thank the Taiwan National Science Councils Vanguard Program NSC 92-2628-M-002-09 and the Belgian F.R.S.- FNRS Grant 4.4508.01 and FWO. K. Hughes thanks the NSF for support through the Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award DGE-1746045. A. Connolly thanks the NSF for Award 1806923 and 2209588, and also acknowledges the Ohio Supercomputer Center. S. A. Wissel thanks the NSF for support through CAREER Award 2033500. A. Vieregg thanks the Sloan Foundation and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Research Computing Center and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago for the resources they provided. R. Nichol thanks the Leverhulme Trust for

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Presenters

  • Mohammad Ful Hossain Seikh

    • University of Kansas

Authors

  • Mohammad Ful Hossain Seikh

    • University of Kansas