Description
Where do ultra-high-energy cosmic rays—the most energetic particles known in the Universe—come from? For decades, the question has remained unanswered. Ultra-high-energy neutrinos, born from cosmic-ray interaction and with energies more than 10,000 times higher than particles made in human-made accelerators—are key to solving this mystery. Yet, so far, we have detected but a single ultra-high-energy neutrino—and unexpectedly at that! The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND) aims to solve this. GRAND is a proposed next-generation observatory optimized to observe ultra-high-energy neutrinos. It does so by detecting the radio signals that the neutrinos emit when they collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. In this work, we forecast the neutrino discovery potential of GRAND for a range of predicted neutrino flux models, from optimistic to pessimistic, anchored on simulations of the detector response. Using Bayesian inference, we report the prospects of discovering the different flux models and of distinguishing between them, crucial steps to finding the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. We find that GRAND, once completed, will be able to detect medium-to-high predicted neutrino fluxes within only a few years’ worth of operation. Our results establish a promising baseline for what the coming decade of ultra-high-energy observations will look like.
| Field of study | Astrophysics |
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| Supervisor | Mauricio Bustamante |