On ANITA's sensitivity to long-lived, charged massive particles

Abstract

We propose that the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) can serve as a detector for long-lived, charged particles, through its measurement of extensive air showers from secondary leptons. To test this on an example model, we simulate the production of staus inside the earth from interactions between ultra-high energy neutrinos and nuclei. We propose that results of ANITA searches for upgoing air showers can be interpreted in terms of constraints on long-lived, charged massive particles (CHAMPs) and consider a supersymmetric partner of the tau lepton, the stau, as an example of such a particle. Exploring the parameter space in stau mass and lifetimes, we find that the stau properties that lead to an observable signal in ANITA are highly energy dependent. At $10^{18.5}$ eV, we find that the best constraints on the product of the neutrino flux and the stau production cross section would be placed near $m_{\tilde{\tau }}=$1 TeV and ${\tau }_{\tilde{\tau }}=$10 ns. Thus ANITA could be sensitive to new physics in a region of parameter space that is unconstrained by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

5 pages, 5 figures, to be submitted to Astropart. Phys. J

References in corpus (10)

• The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna Ultra-high Energy Neutrino Detector Design, Performance, and Sensitivity for 2006-2007 Balloon Flight
• Characteristics of Four Upward-pointing Cosmic-ray-like Events Observed with ANITA
• Search for long-lived charged particles in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV
• Observation of an Unusual Upward-going Cosmic-ray-like Event in the Third Flight of ANITA
• Searches for heavy long-lived charged particles with the ATLAS detector in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV
• Simulation of Radiation Energy Release in Air Showers
• Direct Detection of Supersymmetric Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
• Weak interactions of supersymmetric staus at high energies
• Supersymmetry on the Rocks

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO): A White Paper
• A search for IceCube events in the direction of ANITA neutrino candidates
• Supersymmetric sphaleron configurations as the origin of the perplexing ANITA events
• Explaining the ANITA events by a $L_e-L_{\tau }$ gauge model
• Connecting ANITA Anomalous Events to a Non-thermal Dark Matter Scenario
• Anomalous ANITA air shower events and tau decays
• The pros and cons of beyond standard model interpretations of ANITA events