Observing EeV neutrinos through the Earth: GZK and the anomalous ANITA events

Abstract

Tau neutrinos are unique cosmic messengers, especially at extreme energies. When they undergo a charged-current interaction, the short lifetime of the produced tau gives rise to secondary tau neutrinos that carry a significant fraction of the primary neutrino energy. This effect, known as tau neutrino regeneration, has not been applied to its full potential in current generation neutrino experiments. In this work, we present an updated calculation of tau neutrino regeneration, and explore its implications for two scenarios: the recent anomalous ANITA events and the cosmogenic neutrino flux. For the former, we investigate the idea of localized emission and find that the maximum secondary neutrino flux allowed by IceCube measurements implies a primary flux that is incompatible with the ANITA observation, regardless of the assumed source energy spectrum. For the latter, we study the prospect of detecting the cosmogenic neutrino flux of regenerated PeV neutrinos with current and next generation neutrino detectors.

22 pages, 10 figures. Find the code related to this work at https://github.com/IceCubeOpenSource/TauRunner

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• The IceCube high-energy starting event sample: Description and flux characterization with 7.5 years of data
• Addressing $R_{D^{(\ast )}}$, $R_{K^{(\ast )}}$, muon $g-2$ and ANITA anomalies in a minimal $R$-parity violating supersymmetric framework
• Snowmass White Paper: Beyond the Standard Model effects on Neutrino Flavor
• Complete predictions for high-energy neutrino propagation in matter
• Tau Neutrinos in the Next Decade: from GeV to EeV
• Unified explanation of flavor anomalies, radiative neutrino mass and ANITA anomalous events in a vector leptoquark model
• The signatures of secondary leptons in radio-neutrino detectors in ice
• Ultra-High-Energy Tau Neutrino Cross Sections with GRAND and POEMMA
• Probing New Physics at Future Tau Neutrino Telescopes
• LeptonInjector and LeptonWeighter: A neutrino event generator and weighter for neutrino observatories
• Detector Requirements for Model-Independent Measurements of Ultrahigh Energy Neutrino Cross Sections
• Tau Appearance from High-Energy Neutrino Interactions
• The flavor composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos: measurement forecasts for in-ice radio-based EeV neutrino telescopes
• On the Tau flavor of the cosmic neutrino flux
• Tau depolarization at very high energies for neutrino telescopes
• A search for the anomalous events detected by ANITA using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• IceCube and the origin of ANITA-IV events
• Using Secondary Tau Neutrinos to Probe Heavy Dark Matter Decays in Earth
• From oversimplified to overlooked: the case for exploring Rich Dark Sectors
• Exploring ultra-high energy neutrino experiments through the lens of the transport equation
• Gravitational Waves from Gauge Quanta Produced during Inflation
• Alouette: Yet another encapsulated TAUOLA, but revertible