Simulation and Performance Studies for the Tau Air-Shower Mountain-Based Observatory

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the TAMBO observatory's potential to detect high-energy tau neutrinos using air-shower observations, aiming to improve neutrino flavor measurements beyond IceCube's capabilities.

Contribution

It presents simulation-based performance studies of TAMBO, a novel mountain-based neutrino observatory designed for high-purity tau-neutrino detection in the PeV range.

Findings

TAMBO can effectively identify tau-neutrino CC events.

Expected detection rates and effective areas are promising for high-energy neutrino astronomy.

Discrimination potential exceeds current observatories' capabilities.

Abstract

While IceCube's detection of astrophysical neutrinos at energies up to a few PeV has opened a new window to our Universe, much remains to be discovered regarding these neutrinos' origin and nature. In particular, the difficulty of differentiating electron- and tau-neutrino charged-current (CC) events limits our ability to measure precisely the flavor ratio of this flux. The Tau Air-Shower Mountain-Based Observatory (TAMBO) is a next-generation neutrino observatory capable of producing a high-purity sample of tau-neutrino CC events in the energy range from 1 PeV--100 PeV, i.e. just above the IceCube measurements. An array of water Cherenkov tanks and plastic scintillators deployed in the Colca Canyon will observe the air-shower produced when a tau lepton, produced in a tau-neutrino CC interaction, emerges from the opposite face and decays in the air. In this contribution, I will present the performance studies for TAMBO -- including the expected rates, effective areas, and discrimination potential -- as well as the simulation on which these studies are based.