Speaker
Description
The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is an ultrahigh energy (UHE) neutrino detector at the South Pole, designed to search for radio pulses emitted by neutrino-initiated particle showers in ice. ARA consists of an array of five autonomous stations with 2 km spacing. Each station consists of 16 radio antennas embedded ~200 m deep in the ice that are sensitive to either vertically- or horizontally-polarized signals. Radio arrays like ARA represent a cost-efficient means of achieving the enormous detection O(10 km$^3$) volumes necessary for UHE neutrino detection. This contribution presents the current status of the first-ever array-wide search for UHE neutrinos, leveraging ARA’s unprecedented ~28 station-years of livetime. This search will have the best sensitivity of any radio-based neutrino detector up to 1000 EeV, sufficient to probe the 220 PeV flux inferred from KM3-230213A. Importantly, this study demonstrates the feasibility of array-wide neutrino searches, which are necessary for next-generation detectors, like RNO-G (35 stations planned) and IceCube-Gen2 Radio (361 stations proposed), to achieve their design sensitivity. We discuss the progress towards a fully analyzed sample and improvements to ARA’s detector characterization and analysis sensitivity.
| Collaboration(s) | ARA |
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