Anomalous ANITA air shower events and tau decays

Abstract

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 angles 25-35 degrees 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. We find that for up-going 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.

arXiv comment13 pages, 12 figures

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• Addressing $R_{D^{(\ast )}}$, $R_{K^{(\ast )}}$, muon $g-2$ and ANITA anomalies in a minimal $R$-parity violating supersymmetric framework
• Unified explanation of flavor anomalies, radiative neutrino mass and ANITA anomalous events in a vector leptoquark model
• $(g-2{)}_{\mu ,e}$ and the ANITA anomalous events in a three-loop neutrino mass model
• A search for IceCube events in the direction of ANITA neutrino candidates
• Observing EeV neutrinos through the Earth: GZK and the anomalous ANITA events
• The ANITA Anomalous Events and Axion Quark Nuggets
• Explaining the ANITA events by a $L_e-L_{\tau }$ gauge model
• Connecting ANITA Anomalous Events to a Non-thermal Dark Matter Scenario
• A search for the anomalous events detected by ANITA using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• IceCube and the origin of ANITA-IV events
• The pros and cons of beyond standard model interpretations of ANITA events