Trinity: An Air-Shower Imaging System for the Detection of Ultrahigh Energy Neutrinos

Understand

Efforts to detect ultrahigh energy neutrinos are driven by several objectives: What is the origin of astrophysical neutrinos detected with IceCube? What are the sources of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays? Do the ANITA detected events point to new physics? Shedding light on these questions requires instruments that can detect neutrinos above $10^7$ GeV with sufficient sensitivity - a daunting task.

• While most ultrahigh energy neutrino experiments are based on the detection of a radio signature from shower particles following a neutrino interaction, we believe that the detection of Cherenkov and fluorescence light from shower particles is an attractive alternative.
• Imaging air showers with Cherenkov and fluorescence light is a technique that is successfully used in several ultrahigh energy cosmic ray and very-high energy gamma-ray experiments.
• We performed a case study of an air-shower imaging system for the detection of earth-skimming tau neutrinos.