The PTOLEMY project aims to develop a scalable design for a Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) detector, the first of its kind and the only one conceived that can look directly at the image of the ...Universe encoded in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang. The scope of the work for the next three years is to complete the conceptual design of this detector and to validate with direct measurements that the non-neutrino backgrounds are below the expected cosmological signal. In this paper we discuss in details the theoretical aspects of the experiment and its physics goals. In particular, we mainly address three issues. First we discuss the sensitivity of PTOLEMY to the standard neutrino mass scale. We then study the perspectives of the experiment to detect the CNB via neutrino capture on tritium as a function of the neutrino mass scale and the energy resolution of the apparatus. Finally, we consider an extra sterile neutrino with mass in the eV range, coupled to the active states via oscillations, which has been advocated in view of neutrino oscillation anomalies. This extra state would contribute to the tritium decay spectrum, and its properties, mass and mixing angle, could be studied by analyzing the features in the beta decay electron spectrum.
We interpret recent IceCube results on searches for dark matter accumulated in the Sun in terms of the lightest Kaluza–Klein excitation (assumed here to be the Kaluza–Klein photon,
B
1
), obtaining ...improved limits on the annihilation rate in the Sun, the resulting neutrino flux at the Earth and on the
B
1
-proton cross-sections, for
B
1
masses in the range 30–3000 GeV. These results improve previous results from IceCube in its 22-string configuration by up to an order of magnitude, depending on mass, but also extend the results to
B
1
masses as low as 30 GeV.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We discuss the consequences of the quantum uncertainty on the spectrum of the electron emitted by the beta-processes of a tritium atom bound to a graphene sheet. We analyze quantitatively the issue ...recently raised by Cheipesh, Cheianov, and Boyarsky Phys. Rev. D 104, 116004 (2021), and discuss the relevant timescales and the degrees of freedom that can contribute to the intrinsic spread in the electron energy. We perform careful calculations of the potential between tritium and graphene with different coverages and geometries. With this at hand, we propose possible avenues to mitigate the effect of the quantum uncertainty.
We present results on searches for point-like sources of neutrinos using four years of IceCube data, including the first year of data from the completed 86 string detector. The total livetime of the ...combined data set is 1373 days. For an E super(-2) spectrum, the observed 90% C.L. flux upper limits are ~10 super(-12) TeV super(-1) cm super(-2) s super(-1) for energies between 1 TeV and 1 PeV in the northern sky and ~10 super(-11) TeV super(-1) cm super(-2) s super(-1) for energies between 100 TeV and 100 PeV in the southern sky. This represents a 40% improvement compared to previous publications, resulting from both the additional year of data and the introduction of improved reconstructions. In addition, we present the first results from an all-sky search for extended sources of neutrinos. We update the results of searches for neutrino emission from stacked catalogs of sources and test five new catalogs; two of Galactic supernova remnants and three of active galactic nuclei. In all cases, the data are compatible with the background-only hypothesis, and upper limits on the flux of muon neutrinos are reported for the sources considered.
We present a detailed description of the electromagnetic filter for the PTOLEMY project to directly detect the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB). Starting with an initial estimate for the orbital ...magnetic moment, the higher-order drift process of E×B is configured to balance the gradient-B drift motion of the electron in such a way as to guide the trajectory into the standing voltage potential along the mid-plane of the filter. As a function of drift distance along the length of the filter, the filter zooms in with exponentially increasing precision on the transverse velocity component of the electron kinetic energy. This yields a linear dimension for the total filter length that is exceptionally compact compared to previous techniques for electromagnetic filtering. The parallel velocity component of the electron kinetic energy oscillates in an electrostatic harmonic trap as the electron drifts along the length of the filter. An analysis of the phase-space volume conservation validates the expected behavior of the filter from the adiabatic invariance of the orbital magnetic moment and energy conservation following Liouville’s theorem for Hamiltonian systems.
We present an improved event-level likelihood formalism for including neutrino telescope data in global fits to new physics. We derive limits on spin-dependent dark matter-proton scattering by ...employing the new formalism in a re-analysis of data from the 79-string IceCube search for dark matter annihilation in the Sun, including explicit energy information for each event. The new analysis excludes a number of models in the weak-scale minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) for the first time. This work is accompanied by the public release of the 79-string IceCube data, as well as an associated computer code for applying the new likelihood to arbitrary dark matter models.
We report on the observation of anisotropy in the arrival direction distribution of cosmic rays at PeV energies. The analysis is based on data taken between 2009 and 2012 with the IceTop air shower ...array at the south pole. IceTop, an integral part of the IceCube detector, is sensitive to cosmic rays between 100 TeV and 1 EeV. With the current size of the IceTop data set, searches for anisotropy at the 10 super(-3) level can, for the first time, be extended to PeV energies. We divide the data set into two parts with median energies of 400 TeV and 2 PeV, respectively. In the low energy band, we observe a strong deficit with an angular size of about 30degrees and an amplitude of (-1.58 + or - 0.46 sub(stat) + or - 0.52 sub(sys)) x 10 super(-3) at a location consistent with previous observations of cosmic rays with the IceCube neutrino detector. The study of the high energy band shows that the anisotropy persists to PeV energies and increases in amplitude to (-3.11 + or - 0.38 sub(stat) + or - 0.96 sub(sys)) x 10 super(-3).
We study in detail the impact of the current uncertainty in nucleon matrix elements on the sensitivity of direct and indirect experimental techniques for dark matter detection. We perform two scans ...in the framework of the cMSSM: one using recent values of the pion-sigma term obtained from Lattice QCD, and the other using values derived from experimental measurements. The two choices correspond to extreme values quoted in the literature and reflect the current tension between different ways of obtaining information about the structure of the nucleon. All other inputs in the scans, astrophysical and from particle physics, are kept unchanged. We use two experiments, XENON100 and IceCube, as benchmark cases to illustrate our case. We find that the interpretation of dark matter search results from direct detection experiments is more sensitive to the choice of the central values of the hadronic inputs than the results of indirect search experiments. The allowed regions of cMSSM parameter space after including XENON100 constraints strongly differ depending on the assumptions on the hadronic matrix elements used. On the other hand, the constraining potential of IceCube is almost independent of the choice of these values.
We present the results of the first IceCube search for dark matter annihilation in the center of the Earth. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), candidates for dark matter, can scatter off ...nuclei inside the Earth and fall below its escape velocity. Over time the captured WIMPs will be accumulated and may eventually self-annihilate. Among the annihilation products only neutrinos can escape from the center of the Earth. Large-scale neutrino telescopes, such as the cubic kilometer IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole, can be used to search for such neutrino fluxes. Data from 327 days of detector livetime during 2011/2012 were analyzed. No excess beyond the expected background from atmospheric neutrinos was detected. The derived upper limits on the annihilation rate of WIMPs in the Earth and the resulting muon flux are an order of magnitude stronger than the limits of the last analysis performed with data from IceCube's predecessor AMANDA. The limits can be translated in terms of a spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section. For a WIMP mass of 50 GeV this analysis results in the most restrictive limits achieved with IceCube data.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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