The sensitivity of past and near-future lunar radio experiments to ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper reviews past lunar radio experiments searching for ultra-high-energy particles, re-evaluates their sensitivity with improved models, and discusses prospects for future experiments to detect cosmic rays and neutrinos.

Contribution

It provides a revised sensitivity analysis of previous experiments and proposes future observational setups with improved detection prospects for cosmic rays and neutrinos.

Findings

Past experiments were less sensitive than previously thought.

A refined model improves flux limits for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

Future experiments could detect cosmic rays and neutrinos with high confidence.

Abstract

Various experiments have been conducted to search for the radio emission from ultra-high-energy particles interacting in the lunar regolith. Although they have not yielded any detections, they have been successful in establishing upper limits on the flux of these particles. I present a review of these experiments in which I re-evaluate their sensitivity to radio pulses, accounting for effects which were neglected in the original reports, and compare them with prospective near-future experiments. In several cases, I find that past experiments were substantially less sensitive than previously believed. I apply existing analytic models to determine the resulting limits on the fluxes of ultra-high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays. In the latter case, I amend the model to accurately reflect the fraction of the primary particle energy which manifests in the resulting particle cascade, resulting in a substantial improvement in the estimated sensitivity to cosmic rays. Although these models are in need of further refinement, in particular to incorporate the effects of small-scale lunar surface roughness, their application here indicates that a proposed experiment with the LOFAR telescope would test predictions of the neutrino flux from exotic-physics models, and an experiment with a phased-array feed on a large single-dish telescope such as the Parkes radio telescope would allow the first detection of cosmic rays with this technique, with an expected rate of one detection per 140 hours.