CERN’s ATLAS Detector Identifies High-Energy Supernova Neutrinos, Inspires Future Efforts at Detecting Fluxes of Rare Fermion

The latest discoveries and innovations in physics have led to the discovery and exploration of unusual particles, such as neutrinos. Aside from being rare, high-energy neutrinos are also very hard to detect accurately. The IceCube Collaboration first detected these subatomic particles produced days to months after the explosion in 2013 using a water-based experiment.

Search for High-Energy Neutrinos

Some research papers suggest potential sources of high-energy neutrinos, like nearby supernovae, especially galactic ones. This prompted experts to explore the possibility of detecting the rare fermion coming from these sources using a giant particle collider detector. Most previous studies on high-energy astrophysical neutrinos relied on large-volume water or ice detectors. This has been the basis of the investigations made using IceCube and Super-Kamiokande.

However, physicists believe that large particle detectors in collider experiments can be unique astrophysical neutrino detectors. These detectors have much better energy and angular resolution and greater particle identification capabilities.

Measuring Flux of Neutrinos

A team of experts from Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Nevada recently demonstrated the potential of the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in measuring the flux of high-energy supernova neutrinos. They focused on possible galactic supernovae from Betelgeuse and Eta Carinae as demonstrative examples. Their study's results are discussed in the paper "Detecting High-Energy Neutrinos from Galactic Supernovae with ATLAS."

Scientists already know ATLAS's mass, the neutrino-nucleon cross sections, and the expected flux of neutrinos from a supernova as a function of time. By considering a crucial part of these quantities together, experts could estimate the number of neutrinos that would interact directly in the ATLAS detector.

The research team also accounted for neutrinos interacting on our planet outside the detector and creating a muon that can be detected within the detector. They used Lepton Injector software to model events accounting for the detector geometry, neutrino flux, etc. Their calculations provide an estimated number of neutrino signal events for a particular supernova.

Using information on ATLAS's hardware capabilities, the researchers demonstrated that they can tell these signals apart from the background and recover vital information about the neutrino, like its charge and flavor. The experts concluded that even with limited statistics, the ATLAS detector should be able to characterize the flavor of neutrinos and discriminate between neutrinos and antineutrinos. This makes ATLAS a unique neutrino observatory unmatched in this remarkable capability.

The recent study highlights the capability of the ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collider detectors in detecting high-energy neutrinos coming from galactic supernovae. In the future, this investigation could inspire collaboration between these detectors in gathering new insight into the rare particles with only a limited number of neutrinos.

In the future, the research team plans to continue exploring the newly identified research avenue. They would like to focus on how other collider detectors can contribute to observing high-energy neutrinos.

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