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

Journal Article · Tue Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 2009 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/706/2/1556· OSTI ID:21378087

Gayley, K G; Mutel, R L; Jaeger, T R ^[1]

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1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52245 (United States)

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 and 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{sub e} approx 10{sup 6} m{sup 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 (nuapprox> 300 MHz) and higher energies (E approx> 10{sup 21} eV).

• OSTI ID: 21378087
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 706; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ANTENNAS
APERTURES
APPROXIMATIONS
CALCULATION METHODS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
EEV RANGE
ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT
ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT
ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
ENERGY RANGE
EQUIPMENT
FERMIONS
LEPTONS
MASSLESS PARTICLES
MONTE CARLO METHOD
MOON
NEUTRINOS
OPENINGS
RADIO EQUIPMENT
RADIO TELESCOPES
ROUGHNESS
SATELLITES
SCALING LAWS
SIMULATION
SURFACE PROPERTIES
TELESCOPES