10^20 eV Cosmic-Ray and Particle Physics with Kilometer-Scale Neutrino Telelscopes

Abstract

We show that a kilometer-scale neutrino observatory, though optimized for TeV to PeV energy, is sensitive to the neutrinos associated with super-EeV sources. These include super-heavy relics, neutrinos associated with the Greisen cutoff, and topological defects which are remnant cosmic structures associated with phase transitions in grand unified gauge theories. It is a misconception that new instruments optimized to EeV energy are required to do this important science. Because kilometer-scale neutrino telescopes can reject atmospheric backgrounds by establishing the very high energy of the signal events, they have sensitivity over the full solid angle, including the horizon where most of the signal is concentrated. This is important because up-going neutrino-induced muons, routinely considered in previous calculations, are absorbed by the Earth.

10 pages, Revtex, 5 postscript figures, uses epsfig.sty. Version to be published in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (1)

• Unstable superheavy relic particles as a source of neutrinos responsible for the ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Sensitivity of the IceCube Detector to Astrophysical Sources of High Energy Muon Neutrinos
• High-energy Neutrino Astronomy: The Cosmic Ray Connection
• The high energy cosmic ray spectrum from relic particle decay
• Dark Matter and Global Symmetries
• The Impact of Heavy Nuclei on the Cosmogenic Neutrino Flux
• Black Holes at Neutrino Telescopes
• Signatures of high energy protons in pulsar winds
• Probing the stability of superheavy dark matter particles with high-energy neutrinos
• High energy neutrinos from radio-quiet AGNs
• Which blazars are neutrino loud?
• Propagation of Extremely-high Energy Leptons in the Earth: Implications to their detection by the IceCube Neutrino Telescope
• A First Search for coincident Gravitational Waves and High Energy Neutrinos using LIGO, Virgo and ANTARES data from 2007
• IceCube-Plus: An Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Telescope
• Neutrinos Associated With Cosmic Rays of Top-Down Origin
• Testing Quantum Gravity via Cosmogenic Neutrino Oscillations
• Effects of Electroweak Instantons In High-Energy Neutrino Telescopes
• Search for Ultra-High-Energy Neutrinos with the Telescope Array Surface Detector
• Measuring the Spectra of High Energy Neutrinos with a Kilometer-Scale Neutrino Telescope
• Super-heavy X particle decay and Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Constraints on Neutrino-Nucleon Interactions at energies of 1 EeV with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
• High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy: Opportunities For Particle Physics