POEMMA-Balloon with Radio: A multi-messenger, multi-detector balloon payload

Abstract

A review of the current status of the field of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Ray (UHECR) including a summary of remaining open questions was presented in the white paper "Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: at the Intersection of the Cosmic and Energy Frontiers" (Astropart. Phys. 147 (2023) 102794; arXiv:2205.05845). The authors concluded that two types of next-generation detectors are needed to answer these questions: high-accuracy instruments and detectors that maximize exposure at the highest energies. The Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA), a proposed dual-satellite observatory, exemplifies the latter class and is designed to increase statistics of the highest-energy cosmic rays and to detect very-high-energy neutrinos following multi-messenger alerts. POEMMA-Balloon with Radio (PBR) implements a compact, balloon-borne version of the POEMMA concept, adapted for a Super-Pressure Balloon flight from Wanaka, New Zealand, with an expected campaign exceeding 20 days. PBR couples a wide field-of-view Schmidt telescope and a hybrid optical focal surface with a dedicated radio instrument to deliver simultaneous, complementary measurements of extensive air showers. The mission will validate the fluorescence detection strategy from space and raise technology readiness for a POEMMA-like space mission by observing UHECR-induced fluorescence light from suborbital altitudes, obtaining the first simultaneous optical Cherenkov and radio observations of high-altitude horizontal air showers above the cosmic-ray knee (E>3PeV), enabling energy-spectrum and composition studies at the PeV scale, and performing follow-ups of multi-messenger alerts to search for very-high-energy neutrinos via upward-going air showers. This paper summarizes the PBR payload and its expected performance.

References in corpus (40)

• Multi-messenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A
• The Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory
• The 2MASS Redshift Survey - Description and Data Release
• Evidence for neutrino emission from the nearby active galaxy NGC 1068
• Observation of a Large-scale Anisotropy in the Arrival Directions of Cosmic Rays above $8\times 10^{18}$ eV
• Indications of Intermediate-Scale Anisotropy of Cosmic Rays with Energy Greater Than 57 EeV in the Northern Sky Measured with the Surface Detector of the Telescope Array Experiment
• A Multimessenger Picture of the Flaring Blazar TXS 0506+056: implications for High-Energy Neutrino Emission and Cosmic Ray Acceleration
• Measurement of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum above $2.5\times 10^{18}$ eV using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Radio detection of Cosmic-Ray Air Showers and High-Energy Neutrinos
• Radio detection of cosmic ray air showers in the digital era
• Characteristics of Four Upward-pointing Cosmic-ray-like Events Observed with ANITA
• Observation of an Unusual Upward-going Cosmic-ray-like Event in the Third Flight of ANITA
• High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: Prospects for Coincident Detection with Gravitational Waves
• Universality of electron distributions in high-energy air showers - description of Cherenkov light production
• Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays: The Intersection of the Cosmic and Energy Frontiers
• The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO): A White Paper
• High-Energy Neutrinos from Millisecond Magnetars formed from the Merger of Binary Neutron Stars
• Energy and Flux Measurements of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays Observed During the First ANITA Flight
• Background for a gamma-ray satellite on a low-Earth orbit
• Mini-EUSO mission to study Earth UV emissions on board the ISS
• POEMMA's Target of Opportunity Sensitivity to Cosmic Neutrino Transient Sources
• Leptohadronic Multimessenger Modeling of 324 Gamma-Ray Blazars
• Modeling of the Tau and Muon Neutrino-induced Optical Cherenkov Signals from Upward-moving Extensive Air Showers
• A search for IceCube events in the direction of ANITA neutrino candidates
• The Astronomer's Telegram: A Web-based Short-Notice Publication System for the Professional Astronomical Community
• Unusual Near-horizon Cosmic-ray-like Events Observed by ANITA-IV
• EUSO-SPB1 Mission and Science
• Overview and First Results of EUSO-SPB2
• Macro detection using fluorescence detectors
• Expected Performance of the EUSO-SPB2 Fluorescence Telescope
• On the nature of radio-wave radiation from particle cascades
• Development of a cosmic ray oriented trigger for the fluorescence telescope on EUSO-SPB2
• The EUSO-SPB2 Fluorescence Telescope for the Detection of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Overview of the EUSO-SPB2 Target of Opportunity program using the Cherenkov Telescope
• EAS optical Cherenkov signatures of tau neutrinos for space and suborbital detectors
• Neutrino Target-of-Opportunity Observations with Space-based and Suborbital Optical Cherenkov Detectors
• SuperBIT Superpressure Flight Instrument Overview and Performance: Near diffraction-limited Astronomical Imaging from the Stratosphere
• A search for the anomalous events detected by ANITA using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Neutrino Target-of-Opportunity Sky Coverage and Scheduler for EUSO-SPB2
• Application of Machine Learning to Identify Radio Pulses of Air Showers at the South Pole (ARENA 2024)