Particle astrophysics with high energy neutrinos

Abstract

The topic of this review is the particle astrophysics of high energy neutrinos. High energy is defined as E ν > 100 MeV. Main topics include: -atmospheric neutrinos and muons from π, K and charm decay. They probe uncharted territory in neutrino oscillations and constitute both the background and calibration of high energy neutrino telescopes, -sources of high energy neutrino beams: the galactic plane, the sun, X-ray binaries, supernova remnants and interactions of extra-galactic cosmic rays with background photons, -an extensive review of the mechanisms by which active galaxies may produce high energy particle beams, -high energy neutrino signatures of cold dark matter and, -a brief review of detection techniques (water and ice Cherenkov detectors, surface detectors, radio-and acoustic detectors, horizontal airshower arrays) and the instruments under construction.

Galactic discrete sources of high energy neutrinos

“…In another model, Harding & Gaisser (1990) consider hadrons accelerated in the pulsar wind shock taking as a reference the massive binary Cyg X-3. This model predicts detectable fluxes of neutrinos in a 0.1 km 2 detector (Gaisser et al 1995) only for the case of eclipsing binaries, when the massive star is between the source of relativistic hadrons and the observer.…”

Search for a diffuse flux of astrophysical muon neutrinos with the IceCube 59-string configuration

“…They are generated from the weak decay of charged mesons, in particular pions and kaons produced in hadronic interactions in, or close to, the sources. In generic scenarios [1][2][3] these neutrinos are expected to exhibit the same hard energy spectrum as the accelerated parent particles, yielding a typical differential spectrum ΦðEÞ ∝ E −2 .…”

“…Such a scenario is in particular imaginable for extragalactic sources, e.g. active galactic nuclei, which are among the candidate sources of ultra high-energy cosmic rays and could produce a detectable neutrino signal in the energy region between 10 TeV and 10 PeV [1,2,6].…”

Saturation physics in ultra high energy cosmic rays: heavy quark production

“…On the other hand, the flux of atmospheric neutrinos and muons at very high energies provides the main background of searches for the muons neutrinos from extra-galactic neutrino sources in the neutrinos experiments JHEP00(2007)000 (e.g. AMANDA, Antares, Nestor), limiting the sensitivity of any neutrino telescope to astrophysical signals [4].…”