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ANALYTIC APERTURE CALCULATION AND SCALING LAWS FOR RADIO DETECTION OF LUNAR-TARGET ULTRA-HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRINOS
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

ANALYTIC APERTURE CALCULATION AND SCALING LAWS FOR RADIO DETECTION OF LUNAR-TARGET ULTRA-HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRINOS

K. G. Gayley, R. L. Mutel and T. R. Jaeger
The Astrophysical journal, Vol.706(2), pp.1556-1570
12/01/2009
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/706/2/1556
url
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0904.3389View
Open Access

Abstract

We derive analytic expressions and approximate them in closed form, for the effective detection aperture for Cerenkov radio emission from ultra-high-energy neutrinos striking the Moon. The resulting apertures are in good agreement with recent Monte Carlo simulations and support the conclusion of James & Protheroe that neutrino flux upper limits derived from the GLUE search were too low by an order of magnitude. We also use our analytic expressions to derive scaling laws for the aperture as a function of observational and lunar parameters. We find that at low frequencies downward-directed neutrinos always dominate, but at higher frequencies, the contribution from upward-directed neutrinos becomes increasingly important, especially at lower neutrino energies. Detecting neutrinos from Earth near the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuz'min regime will likely require radio telescope arrays with extremely large collecting area (A(e) similar to 10(6) m(2)) and hundreds of hours exposure time. Higher-energy neutrinos are most easily detected using lower frequencies. Lunar surface roughness is a decisive factor for obtaining detections at higher frequencies (nu greater than or similar to 300 MHz) and higher energies (E greater than or similar to 1021 eV).
 Astronomy & Astrophysics Physical Sciences Science & Technology

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