Fifty years ago, Berezinsky first predicted ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos, the most energetic ones expected, about a thousand times more so than those seen by IceCube so far. Today, we have yet to discover them, but this may finally change in the near future!
IceCube-Gen2, and other upcoming neutrino telescopes, have a real chance of discovering the long-sought diffuse flux of UHE neutrinos. In a new paper, led by Víctor B. Valera and in collaboration with Christian Glaser, we make detailed, robust, and realistic discovery prospects:
Near-future discovery of the diffuse flux of ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos
Victor Branco Valera, Mauricio Bustamante, Christian Glaser
arXiv:2210.03756
Our results are promising: we find that if we are lucky this can happen within only a handful of years of operation! Figures 1 and 14 are the money plots. Figure 1, reproduced below, shows that most flux models can be discovered within ten years of Gen2 and most within a handful of years.
Figure 14, in the paper, shows that, in the event of flux discovery, most models can be distinguished from each other.
This paper is a companion to two earlier papers of ours that use the same computational framework that accounts for theory and experimental nuance to make forecasts:
- Measuring the UHE neutrino-nucleon cross section (also led by Victor Valera): https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04237
- Discovering point sources of UHE neutrinos (led by postdoc Damiano Fiorillo): https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15985
Mauricio Bustamante 