Anomalous ANITA air shower events and tau decays

Shoshana Chipman, Rebecca Diesing, Mary Hall Reno, and Ina Sarcevic
Phys. Rev. D 100, 063011 – Published 18 September 2019

Abstract

Two unusual neutrino events in the Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (ANITA) appear to have been generated by air showers from a particle emerging from the Earth at angle 25°35° above the horizon. We evaluate the effective aperture for ANITA with a simplified detection model to illustrate the features of the angular dependence of expected events for incident standard model tau neutrinos and for sterile neutrinos that mix with tau neutrinos. We apply our sterile neutrino aperture results to a dark matter scenario with long-lived supermassive dark matter that decay to sterile neutrinolike particles. We find that for upgoing air showers from tau decays, from isotropic fluxes of standard model, sterile neutrinos, or other particles that couple to the tau through suppressed weak interaction cross sections cannot be responsible for the unusual events.

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  • Received 28 June 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.063011

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsParticles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

Shoshana Chipman and Rebecca Diesing

  • Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

Mary Hall Reno

  • Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA

Ina Sarcevic

  • Department of Physics, University of Arizona, 1118 E. 4th St. Tucson, Arizona 85704, USA

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Issue

Vol. 100, Iss. 6 — 15 September 2019

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