ARIANNA: A New Frontier In UHE Particle Physics
What is it?
ARIANNA is a new neutrino telescope that can detect neutrinos with energies between 10^15 and 10^20 eV. The final telescope will consist of 960 detectors arranged in a grid of 30km x 30km. ARIANNA intends on detecting Cherenkov light at radio frequencies with specialized antenna and using these detections to learn more about some of the big questions in ultra-high energy particle physics including probing the GZK cutoff as well as possibly aiding the understanding of ultra-high energy neutrino sources.
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Where is it?
ARIANNA is located in the Antarctic, on the Ross Ice Shelf.
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What will it do?
ARIANNA intends to answer, or at least help to answer, some pressing questions in high energy neutrino physics due to a variety of capabilities:
- ARIANNA increases the sensitivity for the detection of GZK neutrinos by an order of magnitude over the state-of-the-art detectors currently under construction, such as ANITA. Simulations indicate that ARIANNA can observe ~ 40 events per 6 months of operation based on widely used predictions for the GZK neutrino flux by Engel, Steckel & Stanev.
- ARIANNA can test alternative scenarios for GZK neutrino production. For example, models that assume that extragalactic cosmic rays are mixed elemental composition, or perhaps entirely iron nuclei, predict fluxes that may be as small as ~5% of the ESS predictions.
- ARIANNA can survey the southern half the sky for point sources of high-energy neutrinos with unprecedented sensitivity. Preliminary reconstruction studies show that the neutrino direction be measured to a precision of 1 degree, and additional improvements in the reconstruction procedure are expected. These encouraging results show that good reconstruction can be achieved despite imprecise knowledge of the path of the signal.
- ARIANNA can probe for physics beyond the standard model by measuring the neutrino cross-section at center of momentum energies of 100 TeV, a factor 10 larger than available at the LHC.
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How does it work?
When the neutrinos fly into the Shelf, they occasionally interact with the ice to produce Cherenkov light. ARIANNA is then able to detect radio Cherenkov light with 8 antennas at each station. With 960 stations, the principle is similar to other Cherenkov experiments that rely on specifically timed coincidences between station detections: if two stations detect neutrinos with a pre-set criterion (regarding time bewteen events, etc) then the signal is recorded and sent to the databank for analysis. The size of the array allows a huge range - two orders of magnitude larger than IceCube's at a fraction of the cost. Also, the Ice Shelf acts as a reflective mirror, which means that the angular resolution of the detector is unparalleled by any current neutrino detector.
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Where can I learn more?
All of ARIANNA's publications - includng talks, conference proceedings and dissertations - are located on this site. Not only that but also one of our research scientists, Eric Berg, has a terrific blog of this pat winter's expedition down to the Shelf, which can be found here:
http://ericcberg.blogspot.com/
Also, for a recent news article, please direct yourself to:
http://sciencedude.ocregister.com/tag/arianna/
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We hope you enjoy your time here on our site, and if you would like more information, feel free to contact our admin staff - they are friendly (after some coffee) and always happy to assist.
Enjoy!
- The ARIANNA Team