12:00–1:00 pm
Please join us:
Daniel Smith's PhD Thesis Defense
Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 12:00 PM CDT
TOPICS ON THE DETECTION OF ULTRA-HIGH ENERGY NEUTRINOS
Ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos, produced in astrophysical sources and in the interaction of UHE cosmic rays with the cosmic microwave background, offer a unique view of processes that are inaccessible by other messenger types at energies above 1E18 eV. In this thesis, I present work from several experiments that broadly represent the field of UHE neutrino detection, including detector commissioning, calibration, data analysis, and simulations for the development of future experiments.
For the Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland, I discuss the detector development and commissioning, as well as a measurement of the radio field attenuation length at Summit Station, Greenland, a measurement important to the detector's sensitivity and electric field reconstruction. For the IceCube experiment, I perform a source search using the experiment's already-measured flux of astrophysical neutrinos, placing limits on the flux contribution from blazar and non-blazar AGN sources. For the ANITA experiment, I discuss electromagnetic simulations to test the hypothesis that non-specular reflections at the ice created the experiment's `anomalous' events. Finally, for the future IceCube-Gen2 experiment, I present simulations for the radio component of the detector, demonstrating the radio detection technique's ability to achieve the science goals of the experiment.
Committee Members:
Abigail Vieregg (Chair)
Damiano Caprioli
Jeff McMahon
David Schmitz