Catching UHE Neutrinos with HERON

TL;DR

HERON is a proposed radio array detector designed to observe ultrahigh energy tau neutrinos skimming the Earth, enabling UHE neutrino astronomy and detection of astrophysical transients.

Contribution

This paper introduces the HERON concept, a novel ultrahigh energy neutrino detector utilizing radio arrays for Earth-skimming tau neutrinos.

Findings

HERON's design achieves a large effective area for horizon-directed neutrino detection.

It can detect up-going extensive air showers initiated by tau neutrinos.

HERON has potential for UHE neutrino astronomy and multi-messenger observations.

Abstract

The Hybrid Elevated Radio Observatory for Neutrinos, or HERON, is a newly proposed ultrahigh energy Earth-skimming tau neutrino detector. Ultrahigh energy tau neutrinos which skim the Earth may produce $\tau$-leptons which escape into the atmosphere and initiate up-going extensive air showers. The HERON concept consists of 24 compact phased radio arrays, embedded within a larger sparse array of 360 standalone antennas, distributed along a mountain range and designed to capture the radio emission of these up-going extensive air showers. Due to the high elevation observation sites and the long propagation length of radio, HERON achieves a very large instantaneous effective area towards the horizon, and thus excels at the detection of astrophysical transient events such as gamma-ray bursts. With the excellent pointing resolution offered by the sparse array, HERON would be capable of conducting UHE neutrino astronomy and could be incorporated into the broader network of multi-messenger instruments. Here, we detail the HERON concept and describe the science which can be accomplished with it.