Focus: Catching Neutrinos on Radar

March 6, 2020• Physics 13, 33

Radar could detect ultrahigh-energy neutrinos from space, according to
experiments using electrons as neutrino stand-ins.

APS/Alan Stonebraker
Neutrino stunt double. In the new experiments, a pulse of electrons (red
line) entered a plastic target, producing a cascade of charged particles,
just as a high-energy neutrino would when entering Antarctic ice. Radio
waves from a transmitter (left)...
High-energy particles from space carry hints about the violent
astrophysical events that created them. Now researchers have
demonstrated the feasibility of a method for detecting cosmic neutrinos
when their energies are between 10 and 100 peta-electron-volts—an
energy blind spot for existing detection methods. The technique involves
bouncing radio waves off a cloud of electrical charge created in a
material after the passage of a high-energy neutrino, although the
experiment used an intense pulse of electrons to mimic the cosmic
particle. The method should help astrophysicists better understand the
events that produce the most energetic neutrinos.

Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays—energetic protons and nuclei from space

—are one of the great mysteries of astrophysics because researchers
don’t know where they come from. The events that produce them ought
to create neutrinos as well, and observing neutrinos has the advantage
that the particles almost never interact with other matter and so travel
along straight lines, thereby giving the direction to their point of origin.
Researchers can already detect neutrinos within certain energy ranges.
For example, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica detects
neutrinos with energies in the range of tera-electron-volts (TeV) to peta-
electron-volts (PeV), which corresponds to 10121012– 10151015eV.
Other techniques should work well for neutrinos of extremely high
energy, well over 100 PeV. A detection gap, however, has remained in
the range of 10 – 100 PeV.

Such a neutrino moving through solid matter will

sometimes create a shower of fast-moving charged
particles called a cascade. As these particles slow
down, they ionize atoms in the solid, leaving behind a
tell-tale cloud of electrical charge.
A team led by Steven Prohira of Ohio State University in Columbus has
now shown that the neutrino might be detected by observing this
charged cloud. To demonstrate the principle, they used a steady source
of electron pulses, rather than waiting for the occasional, high-energy
cosmic neutrino to strike their experiment.

Using an electron beam at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab

in California, the researchers directed intense bursts of high-
energy electrons at a 4-m-long target made of high-density
polyethylene (a plastic). The team chose the electron energies
so that the resulting cascades—one created by each burst of
electrons—would have a particle density much like that
expected for a high-energy neutrino hitting the Earth.
The researchers sent radio waves continuously toward the target in a
direction perpendicular to the electron beam. The ionization cloud
created by each cascade was expected to reflect waves back to a
receiving antenna, providing information in the same way that radar
reflections do. But detecting these cascades required careful data
analysis, because the mere passage of the dense electron beam
through the target generates radio waves some 10 to 100 times stronger
than any reflection from a cascade event.

In preliminary experiments, the team measured the radio waves created

by the electron beam alone—with the radar transmitter turned off—and
found them to be consistent from one pulse to the next. They could then
subtract this background radiation from the full radio signal they
measured with the transmitter turned on to find the evidence of
cascades.

“The most important achievement,” says Prohira, “is that we were able to
measure radar echoes off of individual particle cascades. This has never
been done before.” Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, d