Oindree Banerjee (Ohio State University) "Searching for ultra-high-energy neutrinos with the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna "

Ultra-high-energy (> 10^18 eV) neutrinos remain undiscovered in this era of rapid growth in multi-messenger astronomy. These neutral and weakly-interacting particles can travel cosmic distances without attenuation and point straight back to their source, rendering them promising messengers. Detection of these elusive particles requires an enormous instrumented volume of a dielectric material such as water, ice, salt, etc. Use of radio Cherenkov method enables this at a relatively low cost. The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a NASA-funded long-duration balloon experiment that is launched from near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, to fly over the continent in roughly circular orbits in the stratosphere for a month. ANITA looks for the radio signature from ultra-high-energy neutrino interaction in the ice below. There have been four flights of ANITA so far. I will review the principles underlying radio detection of neutrinos by ANITA, the ANITA instrument and recent developments in the hardware and electronics of ANITA. I will show results from the currently ongoing search for a diffuse flux of neutrinos in the data from the third flight of ANITA.

Bio:

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Physics from North Carolina State University. Currently, I am a 5th year graduate student in Physics at Ohio State University. For the ANITA-IV mission, I built, tested and deployed electronics which, for the first time, were able to dynamically filter anthropogenic noise at tunable frequencies. These filters helped to triple the “effective livetime” of ANITA-IV compared to ANITA-III. In analysis, I am working on new techniques for background rejection using data from the ANITA-II and ANITA-III flights.