Development of neutrino initiated cascades at mid and high altitudes in the atmosphere

TL;DR

This paper presents a simulation study of neutrino-initiated air showers at mid and high altitudes, aiding the development of detection techniques for ultra-high-energy neutrinos with space observatories.

Contribution

It combines PYTHIA and CONEX to simulate neutrino-induced air showers and analyzes their longitudinal profiles at various altitudes, focusing on observability by space fluorescence detectors.

Findings

Detailed structure of neutrino-induced shower profiles analyzed.

Showers at mid and high altitudes are promising targets for space observatories.

Simulation framework enables rapid modeling of ultra-high-energy neutrino interactions.

Abstract

Neutrinos are a very promising messenger at tens of EeV and above. They can be produced by several channels, namely as by products of hadronic interactions at the sources, as the main products of the decay of super massive particles and, in a guaranteed way, as the result of the propagation of UHECR through the bath of microwave relic photons. A new era of very large exposure space observatories, of which the JEM-EUSO mission is a prime example, is on the horizon and, with it, it is even larger the possibility of astrophysical neutrino detection at the highest energies. In the present work we use a combination of the PYTHIA interaction code with the CONEX shower simulation package in order to produce fast one-dimensional simulations of neutrino initiated showers in air. We make a detail study of the structure of the corresponding longitudinal profiles, but focus our physical analysis mainly on the development of showers at mid and high altitudes, where they can be an interesting target for space fluorescence observatories.