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Title: Anomalous ANITA air shower events and tau decays

Journal Article · · Physical Review D

Two unusual neutrino events in the Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (ANITA) appear to have been generated by air showers from a particle emerging from the Earth at angle ~25°–35° above the horizon. We evaluate the effective aperture for ANITA with a simplified detection model to illustrate the features of the angular dependence of expected events for incident standard model tau neutrinos and for sterile neutrinos that mix with tau neutrinos. We apply our sterile neutrino aperture results to a dark matter scenario with long-lived supermassive dark matter that decay to sterile neutrino-like particles. Here, we find that for upgoing air showers from tau decays, from isotropic fluxes of standard model, sterile neutrinos, or other particles that couple to the tau through suppressed weak interaction cross sections cannot be responsible for the unusual events.

Research Organization:
Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0010113; FG02-13ER41976; SC0009913; 80NSSC18K0246
OSTI ID:
1595315
Journal Information:
Physical Review D, Vol. 100, Issue 6; ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 10 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays text January 2018
Upward-Pointing Cosmic-Ray-like Events Observed with ANITA preprint January 2018
The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND): Science and Design text January 2018
Leptoquark solution for both the flavor and ANITA anomalies text January 2018
Constraints on the ultra-high energy cosmic neutrino flux from the fourth flight of ANITA text January 2019
Can the ANITA anomalous events be due to new physics? text January 2019
Explaining the ANITA Anomaly with Inelastic Boosted Dark Matter text January 2019
Tau Neutrinos in the Auger Observatory : A New Window to UHECR Sources text January 2001
UHE and EHE neutrino induced taus inside the Earth text January 2002
The energy spectrum of tau leptons induced by the high energy Earth-skimming neutrinos text January 2003
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Tau neutrino propagation and tau energy loss text January 2005
Quantum structure of the non-Abelian Weizsacker-Williams field for a very large nucleus text January 1997
Neutrino Interactions at Ultrahigh Energies text January 1998
Fock Space Distributions, Structure Functions, Higher Twists and Small x text January 1998