Speaker
Description
Over the last 15 years, the Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (ANITA)
collaboration has flown interferometric radio arrays on long-duration balloon
payloads over Antarctica. ANITA seeks to detect the Askaryan radio emission
produced from interactions of ultrahigh-energy (>1 EeV) neutrinos in the
Antarctic Ice Sheet. Above 10^{19.5} eV, ANITA sets world-leading limits on
neutrino flux.
ANITA is also sensitive to radio emission from extensive air showers. In
addition to a number of cosmic ray candidates, ANITA has also detected several
events consistent with upward-going air showers. While atmospheric tau decays
from energetic tau neutrinos interacting in the Earth could produce such event
topologies, the implied rate poses challenges for this explanation. If real,
these events could be a hint of new physics.
The successor to ANITA is the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO),
with hardware improvements and a more sensitive triggering technique to improve
on ANITA's sensitivity by more than an order of magnitude at 10^19 eV. PUEO is
expected to launch in 2024.
