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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) (SC-25)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0010113; SC0009913; SC0009913
OSTI ID:
1595315
Journal Information:
Physical Review D, Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Issue: 6 Vol. 100; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Constraints on the ultra-high energy cosmic neutrino flux from the fourth flight of ANITA text January 2019
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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
Earth-skimming UHE Tau Neutrinos at the Fluorescence Detector of Pierre Auger Observatory text January 2004
Acceptances for Space-Based and Ground-Based Fluorescence Detectors, and Inference of the Neutrino-Nucleon Cross-Section above 10^19 eV text January 2005
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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
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Supersymmetric sphaleron configurations as the origin of the perplexing ANITA events text January 2019

Cited By (1)

( g − 2 ) μ , e and the ANITA anomalous events in a three-loop neutrino mass model journal December 2019