Complex Analysis of Askaryan Radiation: A Fully Analytic Model in the Time-Domain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully analytic time-domain model for Askaryan radiation from ultra-high energy neutrino-induced cascades, improving event reconstruction and real-time detection capabilities.

Contribution

It presents a novel fully analytic time-domain model for Askaryan radiation that closely matches existing semi-analytic models, enhancing neutrino detection methods.

Findings

Model achieves correlation coefficients > 0.95 with semi-analytic approaches.

Fractional power differences are less than 5%.

Model facilitates real-time detector sensitivity improvements.

Abstract

The detection of ultra-high energy (UHE, >10 PeV) neutrinos via detectors designed to utilize the Askaryan effect has been a long-time goal of the astroparticle physics community. The Askaryan effect describes radio-frequency (RF) radiation from high-energy cascades. When a UHE neutrino initiates a cascade, cascade properties are imprinted on the radiation. Thus, observed radiation properties must be used to reconstruct the UHE neutrino event. Analytic Askaryan models have three advantages when used for UHE neutrino reconstruction. First, cascade properties may be derived from the match between analytic function and observed data. Second, analytic models minimize computational intensity in simulation packages. Third, analytic models can be embedded in firmware to enhance the real-time sensitivity of detectors. We present a fully analytic Askaryan model in the time-domain for UHE neutrino-induced cascades in dense media that builds upon prior models in the genre. We then show that our model matches semi-analytic parameterizations used in Monte Carlo simulations for the design of IceCube-Gen2. We find correlation coefficients greater than 0.95 and fractional power differences < 5% between the the fully analytic and semi-analytic approaches.