Abstract
The surface detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory is sensitive to Ultra High Energy (UHE) neutrinos. Neutrinos of all flavors can interact in the atmosphere producing inclined showers near the ground. Moreover, ultra high energy Earth-skimming tau neutrinos can be observed through the detection of showers induced by the decay of tau leptons created by interactions in the Earth’s crust. In both cases, neutrino showers can be identified through the time structure of the signals in the surface detector stations. Two sets of identification criteria have been designed to search for down-going and up-going neutrinos in the recorded data, with no candidates found. We will discuss the identification criteria used, and we will present the corresponding limits on the diffuse and point source neutrino fluxes.
Highlights
All the proposed models for the origin of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR, as are usually named cosmic rays with E > 1018 eV) predict a flux of high energy neutrinos, mainly via charged pion decay following interactions on matter and radiation
It uses two different techniques to detect the air showers: an array of about 1660 water Cherenkov detectors, placed at a distance of 1.5 km from each other, samples the particles at ground level over an area of about 3000 km2, while a fluorescence detector (FD [4]) observes the ultra-violet light emitted by atmospheric nitrogen excited by the particles of the shower
Two different trigger modes are implemented in the stations, a simple threshold trigger and a time over threshold trigger (ToT) requiring that at least 13 samples are over a lower threshold within a sliding window of 3 μs (120 samples)
Summary
All the proposed models for the origin of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR, as are usually named cosmic rays with E > 1018 eV) predict a flux of high energy neutrinos, mainly via charged pion decay following interactions on matter and radiation. The main goal of the Auger Observatory is the detection of extensive air showers produced by UHECRs, it has a good detection and identification capability for neutrinos with energies above 1017 eV At such energy, neutrinos of all flavors can interact in the atmosphere inducing a “down-going” (DG) shower that can be detected at ground. Two different trigger modes are implemented in the stations, a simple threshold trigger and a time over threshold trigger (ToT) requiring that at least 13 samples are over a lower threshold within a sliding window of 3 μs (120 samples)
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