• Open Access

Sterile neutrino origin for the upward directed cosmic ray showers detected by ANITA

John F. Cherry and Ian M. Shoemaker
Phys. Rev. D 99, 063016 – Published 22 March 2019

Abstract

The ANITA balloon experiment has recently observed several EeV cascade events at an angle below the horizon that renders any Standard Model (SM) interpretation unlikely as the Earth is significantly opaque to all SM particles at such energies. In this paper, we study a sterile neutrino interpretation of these events, calculating the angular acceptance of cascades and the relative sensitivities of several experiments to a cascade initiated by an EeV sterile neutrino. We find that ANITA is uniquely sensitive to this type of upward directed cascade signal over a wide portion of the sky and from the direction of the two observed events has a transient acceptance roughly equivalent to that of the IceCube experiment.

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  • Received 26 August 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.063016

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsParticles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

John F. Cherry* and Ian M. Shoemaker

  • Department of Physics, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069, USA
  • Department of Physics, Center for Neutrino Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA

  • *JJ.Cherry@usd.edu

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Issue

Vol. 99, Iss. 6 — 15 March 2019

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