We report on four radio-detected cosmic-ray (CR) or CR-like events observed with the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a NASA-sponsored long-duration balloon payload. Two of the four were previously identified as stratospheric CR air showers during the ANITA-I flight. A third stratospheric CR was detected during the ANITA-II flight. Here, we report on characteristics of these three unusual CR events, which develop nearly horizontally, 20-30 km above the surface of Earth. In addition, we report on a fourth steeply upward-pointing ANITA-I CR-like radio event which has characteristics consistent with a primary that emerged from the surface of the ice. This suggests a possible τ-lepton decay as the origin of this event, but such an interpretation would require significant suppression of the standard model τ-neutrino cross section.

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We report the observation of sixteen cosmic ray events of mean energy of 1.5 × 10 19 eV, via radio pulses originating from the interaction of the cosmic ray air shower with the Antarctic geomagnetic field, a process known as geosynchrotron emission. We present the first ultra-wideband, far-field measurements of the radio spectral density of geosynchrotron emission in the range from 300-1000 MHz. The emission is 100% linearly polarized in the plane perpendicular to the projected geomagnetic field. Fourteen of our observed events are seen to have a phase-inversion due to reflection of the radio beam off the ice surface, and two additional events are seen directly from above the horizon.The origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) remains a mystery decades after their discovery [1,2]. Key to the solution will be increased statistics on events of high enough energy (≥ 3 × 10 19 eV) to elucidate the endpoint of the UHECR energy spectrum as seen at Earth. The primary difficulty is the extreme rarity of events at these energies. Despite steady progress with experiments such as the Pierre Auger Observatory, there remains room for new methodologies. Cosmic rays have been detected for decades via impulsive radio geosynchrotron emission [3,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]] but until now not in this crucial energy range, which offers the possibility of pointing the UHECRs back to their sources. We present data from the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) [21] which represents the first entry of radio techniques into this energy range. We find 16 UHECR events, at least 40% of which are above 10 19 eV, and we show compelling evidence of their origin as geosynchrotron emission from cosmic-ray showers. Our results indicate degree-scale precision for reconstruction of the UHECR arrival direction, lending strong credence to efforts to develop radio geosynchrotron detection as a competitive method of UHECR particle astronomy.Geosynchrotron emission arises when the electron-positron particle cascade initiated by a primary cosmic ray encounters the Lorentz force in the geomagnetic field. The resulting acceleration deflects the electrons and positrons and they begin to spiral in opposite directions around the field lines [17,18]. In air, the particles' radiation length is of order 40 g cm −2 , a kilometer or less at the altitudes of air shower maximum development. Particle trajectories form partial arcs around the field lines before they lose enough energy to drop out of the shower. The meter-scale longitudinal thickness of the shower particle 'pancake' is comparable to radio wavelengths below several hundred MHz; thus the ensemble behavior of all of the cascade particles yields forward-beamed synchrotron emission which is partially or fully coherent in the radio regime. Therefore, the resulting radio impulse power grows quadratically with primary particle energy, and at the highest energies, yields radio pulses that are detectable at large distances. Current systems under development for detection of thes...

We report on the first observations of the Askaryan effect in ice: coherent impulsive radio Cherenkov radiation from the charge asymmetry in an electromagnetic (EM) shower. Such radiation has been observed in silica sand and rock salt, but this is the first direct observation from an EM shower in ice. These measurements are important since the majority of experiments to date that rely on the effect for ultra-high energy neutrino detection are being performed using ice as the target medium. As part of the complete validation process for the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, we performed an experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in June 2006 using a 7.5 metric ton ice target, yielding results fully consistent with theoretical expectations.Very large scale optical Cherenkov detectors such as the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) and its successor IceCube have demonstrated the excellent utility of Cherenkov radiation in detection of neutrino interactions at >TeV energies [1, 2] with ice as a target medium. However, at neutrino energies above 100 PeV, the cubic-km scale of such detectors is inadequate to detect more than a handful of events from the predicted cosmogenic neutrino fluxes [3] which represent the most compelling models at these energies. The relevant detector volume for convincing detection and characterization of these neutrinos is in the range of hundreds to thousands of cubic km of water equivalent mass, and the economic constraints of scaling up the optical Cherenkov technique almost certainly preclude extending it much beyond the size of the current IceCube detector, which will be completed early in the next decade.Given the need for an alternative technique with a more tractable economy of scale to reach into the EeV (=1000 PeV) energy regime, a new method which we denote the radio Cherenkov technique, has emerged within the last decade. This method relies on properties of electromagnetic cascades in a dielectric medium. It was first hypothesized by Askaryan [4] and confirmed in 2001 at SLAC [5]. High energy processes such as Compton, Bhabha, and Moller scattering, along with positron annihilation rapidly lead to a ∼ 20% negative charge asymmetry in the electron-photon part of a cascade. In dense media the shower charge bunch is compact, largely contained within a several cm radius. At wavelengths of 10 cm or more, much larger than the characteristic shower bunch size, the relativistic shower bunch appears as a single charge moving through the dielectric over a distance of several meters or more. As an example, a typical shower with mean Bjorken inelasticity y = 0.2, initiated by a E ν = 100 PeV neutrino will create a total number of charged particles at shower maximum of order n e+ +n e− = y E ν /1 GeV ∼ 2 × 10 7 . The net charge is thus n e+ − n e− − ∼ 4 × 10 6 e. Since the radiated power for Cherenkov emission grows quadratically with the charge of the emitter, the coherent power in the cm-to-m wavelength regime is ∼ 10 13 times gre...

The first flight of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment recorded 16 radio signals that were emitted by cosmic-ray induced air showers. The dominant contribution to the radiation comes from the deflection of positrons and electrons in the geomagnetic field, which is beamed in the direction of motion of the air shower. For 14 of these events, this radiation is reflected from the ice and subsequently detected by the ANITA experiment at a flight altitude of ∼36 km. In this paper, we estimate the energy of the 14 individual events and find that the mean energy of the cosmic-ray sample is 2.9 × 10 18 eV, which is significantly lower than the previous estimate. By simulating the ANITA flight, we calculate its exposure for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. We estimate for the first time the cosmic-ray flux derived only from radio observations and find agreement with measurements performed at other observatories. In addition, we find that the ANITA data set is consistent with Monte-Carlo simulations for the total number of observed events and with the properties of those events.

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) reconstructs a sample's volumetric refractive index (RI) to create high-contrast, quantitative 3D visualizations of biological samples. However, standard implementations of ODT use interferometric systems, and so are sensitive to phase instabilities, complex mechanical design, and coherent noise. Furthermore, their reconstruction framework is typically limited to weaklyscattering samples, and thus excludes a whole class of multiple-scattering samples. Here, we implement a new 3D RI microscopy technique that utilizes a computational multi-slice beam propagation method to invert the optical scattering process and reconstruct high-resolution (NA>1.0) 3D RI distributions of multiple-scattering samples. The method acquires intensity-only measurements from different illumination angles, and then solves a non-linear optimization problem to recover the sample's 3D RI distribution. We experimentally demonstrate reconstruction of samples with varying amounts of multiple scattering: a 3T3 fibroblast cell, a cluster of C. elegans embryos, and a whole C. elegans worm, with lateral and axial resolutions of ≤250 nm and ≤900 nm, respectively. for text or data mining, so long as such uses are for non-commercial purposes and appropriate attribution is maintained. All other rights are reserved. Fluorescent imaging has enabled stunning visualizations of biological processes at a variety of size scales and resolutions, for studies of gene expression, protein interactions, intracellular dynamics, etc [1][2][3][4]. However, the fluorescent techniques require exogenous biological labels, and so do not directly give endogenous information about a sample's biological structure.Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) also targets 3D biological imaging. In contrast to fluorescent methods, ODT avoids the use of exogenous biological labels, and instead utilizes the intrinsic optical variation within a sample to reconstruct its 3D refractive-index (RI) distribution [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Hence, ODT avoids some of fluorescent imaging's main drawbacks, such as photobleaching, slow acquisition speed, low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, and complex samplepreparation protocol. Furthermore, RI imaging enables examination of the structural, mechanical, and biochemical properties of a sample, which are important for studies in morphology, mass, shear stiffness, and spectroscopy [9,[12][13][14][15].Standard implementations of ODT use either a rotating sample or a scanning laser beam to capture the angle-specific scattering arising from the sample [5,7,[16][17][18]. Under the assumption of weak scattering (i.e., 1st Born or Rytov approximations), 2D electric-field measurements directly yield information about the sample's 3D scattering potential [19][20][21]. Standard ODT reconstruction algorithms utilize the Fourier diffraction theorem to project the information contained in each electric-field measurement onto spherical shells (i.e., Ewald surfaces) in the 3D Fourier space of the sample's scattering potential [22,23]. ...

We report new limits on cosmic neutrino fluxes from the test flight of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, which completed an 18.4 day flight of a prototype long-duration balloon payload, called ANITA-lite, in early 2004. We search for impulsive events that could be associated with ultrahigh energy neutrino interactions in the ice and derive limits that constrain several models for ultrahigh energy neutrino fluxes and rule out the long-standing -burst model.

We report initial results of the first flight of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA-1) 2006-2007 Long Duration Balloon flight, which searched for evidence of a diffuse flux of cosmic neutrinos above energies of E ν ≃ 3 × 10 18 eV. ANITA-1 flew for 35 days looking for radio impulses due to the Askaryan effect in neutrino-induced electromagnetic showers within the Antarctic ice sheets. We report here on our initial analysis, which was performed as a blind search of the data. No neutrino candidates are seen, with no detected physics background. We set model-independent limits based on this result. Upper limits derived from our analysis rule out the highest cosmogenic neutrino models. In a background horizontal-polarization channel, we also detect six events consistent with radio impulses from ultra-high energy extensive air showers.In all standard models for ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) propagation, their range is ultimately limited by the opacity of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The UHECR energy above which this becomes significant is about 6 × 10 19 eV in the current epoch. This cuts off their travel beyond distances of order 50 Mpc as first noted by Greisen [1], and Zatseptin and Kuzmin [2] (GZK). As a result of this absorption, the UHECR energy above this GZK cutoff is ultimately converted to photons, neutrinos, and lower energy hadrons. The resulting neutrinos were first described by Berezinsky and Zatsepin (BZ) [3]. In standard UHECR source models the BZ neutrino fluxes peak at energies about 2 orders of magnitude below the GZK energy. Thus a "guaranteed" flux of neutrinos at energies of E ν = 10 17−20 eV exists. Its detection is one of the clearest ways to reveal the nature and cosmic distribution of the UHECR sources [4], which is one of the longest-standing problems in high energy astrophysics.The ANITA-1 Long Duration Balloon experiment was designed specifically to search for this cosmogenic BZ neutrino flux. ANITA-1 exploits the Askaryan effect, in which strong coherent radio emission arises from electromagnetic showers in any dielectric medium [5]. The effect was first observed in 2000 [6], and has now been clearly confirmed and characterized for ice as the medium, as part of the pre-flight calibration of the ANITA-1 payload [7]. A prior flight of a prototype payload called ANITA-lite in 2003ANITA-lite in -2004 led to validation of the technique and initial neutrino flux limits that ruled out several UHE neutrino models [8].In a previous paper [9], we describe in detail the ANITA-1 instrument, payload, and flight system. Reference [9] also includes details of the instrument performance during the flight, estimates of the overall sensitivity of the instrument to neutrino fluxes, and discussions of possible backgrounds. Because of the complexity of the flight system and methodology, we refer the reader to ref.[9] for more detail when necessary.The ANITA-1 payload (Fig. 1) launched from Williams Field, Antarctica near McMurdo station, on December 15, 2006, and executed m...