10:00 am–12:00 pm
Zachary Martin’s PhD Thesis Defense
Tuesday, November 3 at 10:00 AM CDT
TOWARD THE DETECTION OF ULTRAHIGH ENERGY NEUTRINOS WITH BEAMFORMING RADIO EXPERIMENTS
Observations of neutrinos at ultrahigh energies above 100 PeV would provide access to distant astrophysical environments at the highest energies in the universe. The exceptionally low flux requires detectors scaling many cubic kilometer volumes or several years of live time. Since particle interactions in the Earth give rise to coherent and impulsive radio emission through Askaryan and geomagnetic mechanisms, radio detection can achieve world-leading sensitivity to the ultrahigh energy neutrino flux due to long signal propagation lengths and linear signal scaling with high energy. Additionally, real-time beamforming triggers in radio arrays significantly lower detection thresholds through coherent sums of the signal.
This dissertation details work contributed to two beamforming radio experiments towards the detection of ultrahigh neutrinos. The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) is a balloon-borne radio array that monitors the Antarctic ice sheet to primarily target Askaryan emission in the 300 -- 1200 MHz band. The Beamforming Elevated Array for COsmic Neutrinos (BEACON) considers beamforming radio arrays on high-elevation mountaintops to monitor large volumes of horizon for geomagnetic emission in the 30 -- 80 MHz band produced as a consequence of Earth-skimming tau neutrinos. I will present the development and deployment of the PUEO and BEACON instruments. I will also present a cosmic ray search with the BEACON prototype using hybrid radio and scintillator detection and the observation of 22 candidate cosmic-ray events over an estimated background of 0.11 events.
Committee members:
Abigail Vieregg (Chair)
Young-Kee Kim
Thomas Crawford
Gordan Krnjaic
Zachary will be on the daunting hunt for jobs in RF engineering or data science in Chicago.
Event Type
Nov
3