Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1812.07596

Geometrical Constraints of Observing Very High Energy Earth-Skimming Neutrinos from Space

Abstract

The detection of very-high-energy (VHE) neutrinos ($E_ν\gtrsim 10$ PeV) is a challenge that future generations of experiments are being designed and constructed to address. One promising method relies on using the Earth as a neutrino target for indirect detection of skimming tau neutrinos interacting within the Earth and producing tau leptons that are able to escape and decay in the atmosphere. The tau decay produces upward-moving Extensive Air Showers (EASs). A space-based or suborbital instrument observing the ground near the Earth limb can search for the beamed Cherenkov signal produced by the up-going EAS resulting from the tau-lepton decay. In this paper, we derive the geometrical constraints for such an observation in general and for the specific case of the Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) mission currently under study, focusing on the Cherenkov signal detection. We show that, using reasonable orbital parameters, POEMMA can achieve full-sky coverage to search for potential neutrino sources over the length of its mission. We also show that follow-up of a transient Target-of-Opportunity (ToO), such as a flaring source, can be achieved within an orbit time scale depending on the source location on the celestial sphere and its relative position with respect to the Sun and the Moon.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Claire Guépin, Frédéric Sarazin, John Krizmanic, Jacqueline Loerincs, Angela Olinto, Ashley Piccone. 2018-12-18. Geometrical Constraints of Observing Very High Energy Earth-Skimming Neutrinos from Space. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516%2F2019%2F03%2F021

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Observations of Binary Stars with the 1.3-m Devasthal Fast Optical Telescope Using Speckle Interferometry: An Attempt

We present a feasibility study of implementing optical interferometry and speckle techniques with the 1.3-m Devasthal Fast Optical Telescope (DFOT) at Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), which is currently dedicated to photometric observations. Using the sCMOS camera at the DFOT backend, we perform interferometric speckle observations of six binary stars. Standard Speckle Interferometry algorithms are applied to analyze the recorded speckle images. While this study does not aim to achieve the diffraction limit of DFOT or address a full science-driven resolution case, it serves as a crucial testbed for instrumentation, data acquisition, and analysis of Speckles with DFOT. Although the individual speckle patterns exhibit significant positional variations from frame to frame, the Speckle Interferometry analysis successfully recovers the characteristic three-peak structure of the wide binaries, allowing their relative separations and position angles to be determined, demonstrating the viability of the approach. The measured angular relative separations of $γ$ Leo, $γ$ Vir, and $ζ$ Her are $4.744'' \pm 0.012''$, $3.387'' \pm 0.027''$, and $1.582'' \pm 0.026''$, respectively, with corresponding projected position angles of $126.94^{\circ} \pm 0.14^\circ$, $171.57^{\circ} \pm 0.33^\circ$, and $81.06^{\circ} \pm 0.91^\circ$. These measurements are consistent with previously reported values in the literature, which provides strong motivation for more systematic observations and future implementation of optical interferometry techniques at meter-class telescopes.

astro-ph.IM

Time-Domain Synthesis of Gravitational-Wave Detector Glitches using Class-Conditional Derivative Generative Adversarial Networks

Gravitational-wave detectors such as LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA are highly sensitive instruments susceptible to many noise sources. Short-duration transient noise events, known as glitches, pose a particular challenge for data analysis pipelines, as they can mimic or obscure astrophysical signals. We present GlitchGAN, a class-conditional generative model built on the Conditional Derivative GAN (cDVGAN) architecture, capable of synthesizing seven glitch types from LIGO's third observing run (O3) directly in the time domain. GlitchGAN generalizes effectively, learning to reproduce a diverse glitch space consistent with high-quality DeepExtractor reconstructions, and can generate hybrid glitch morphologies by interpolating across its class-conditioning vector. It generates 1000 glitches in under 22 seconds on a CPU, suitable for detector simulations, mock data challenges, and pipeline validation. Synthetic glitches are validated using the Gravity Spy classifier and UMAP embeddings, both showing strong agreement with real data. To probe residual distributional differences, we train a separate holdout GlitchGAN model and use a downstream CNN to distinguish held-out real glitches from synthetic ones: detectability is high in a clean representation but drops substantially once both populations are injected into realistic detector noise, the condition under which they would typically be used. Despite this, GlitchGAN-generated glitches remain practically useful: augmenting real training sets with synthetic samples matches simple duplication of real data when data is abundant, and increasingly outperforms it as real data becomes scarce. Finally, we highlight a limitation of magnitude-only spectrograms: magnitude Q-transform classifiers can confidently misclassify physically unrealistic glitches from less robust models, underscoring the need for validation methods that preserve phase information.

astro-ph.IM

SGN: A python framework for stream-processing pipelines

We present the Stream Graph Navigator (SGN), a lightweight Python framework for building streaming data applications. In SGN, stream-processing pipelines are built by connecting computational components into directed acyclic graphs that run within an event loop. The time-series extension of the SGN library, SGN-TS, introduces signal processing methods to handle time series data. Together, SGN and SGN-TS provide the foundation for SGNL, a matched-filtering gravitational-wave search pipeline, and are being adopted by multiple projects across the low-latency gravitational-wave data analysis infrastructure as an extensible and maintainable framework for future gravitational-wave observations.

astro-ph.IM