Building radio detectors to search for astrophysical neutrinos

by Prof. Anna Nelles (FAU Erlangen / DESY Zeuthen)

Thursday 11 Jul 2024, 16:15 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

D 114 (ENC)

The cosmos manages to accelerate particles to energies that are unattainable for man-made accelerators, ultra-high energy cosmic rays. The sources in which this happens have been elusive. The arrival directions of these cosmic rays do not point back to their sources, due to their bent trajectories in (extra-)galactic magnetic fields. Their neutral counterpart, the neutrinos, do reveal the sources, however, they require massive detector volumes to be detected. This is in particular true at energies of EeV, which correspond to the highest energy cosmic rays. This talk will introduce you to the Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland (RNO-G), the world's largest neutrino detector, currently under construction. We will walk through science case, detection method, experimental challenges, and first data. With being a mid-scale experiment, RNO-G is also a stepping stone towards IceCube-Gen2.

Einladender: Markus Cristinziani / CPPS