# Untitled Document

Developments in High Energy Neutrino Astronomy<sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1To appear in Europhysics News, 1999   
R.J. Protheroe, University of Adelaide, Australia   

Nature produces cosmic ray particles, probably protons, with energies well above $`10^{20}`$ eV – how are they produced? Where do they come from? Gamma rays with energies above $`10^{13}`$ eV are produced in jets of active galaxies – are these produced by energetic electrons or protons? What is the correct model of Gamma Ray Bursts? These are just some of the fundamental questions in high energy astrophysics to be answered by observations made with large area neutrino telescopes.

When gamma rays result from hadronic interactions of protons neutrinos are also produced, but they are not produced when energetic electrons Compton scatter X-rays to gamma-ray energies. So neutrino observations may distinguish between models of active galactic nuclei. Similarly, models for the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays (almost certainly extragalactic) – acceleration of protons in hot spots of giant radio galaxies, acceleration by Gamma Ray Bursts, decay of massive X particles produced by topological defects – may be distinguished as they have very different neutrino signatures, as do different models for Gamma Ray Bursts.

One big advantage of neutrino astronomy is that because of their low interaction cross section neutrinos can escape from regions opaque to photons, but this is also their biggest disadvantage as most neutrinos pass unobserved through the Earth.

Predicted fluxes and detection rates are very low, and telescopes of area approaching 1 km<sup>2</sup> are needed to detect diffuse background intensities. More than three decades ago, Russian and American physicists thought of instrumenting a huge volume of water with photomultiplers to look for Cherenkov light produced by an upward-going muon produced by an interaction below the detector of a muon-neutrino which had passed upwards through the Earth.

The AMANDA telescope located at the South Pole has recently detected sixteen upward-going neutrino events with energies in the range $`10^{11}`$ eV to $`10^{12}`$ eV. The detectors used consisted of ten “strings” of photomultipliers (a total of 289) placed in deep vertical holes in the transparent Antarctic ice. Each string extends from 1.5 km to 2 km depth, and the holes are spread over $`10^4`$ m<sup>2</sup> at the surface. All sixteen events are probably produced by cosmic rays interacting with air nuclei in the Northern Hemisphere, but they are detected well above any background. The neutrino-induced muon tracks are clearly seen and the angular resolution is very good, currently about 2. One of the events has a muon track which is nearly vertical and is almost coincident with String 6 – shown in the diagram (provided by Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin) where the signal in each detector is indicated by the size of the circle. The graph shows the time each photomultiplier triggered plotted against its depth, giving a perfect correlation for detectors on String 6, and showing the muon’s speed was close to the speed of light. This exciting result shows that the goal of constructing viable telescopes for high energy neutrino astronomy is achievable at reasonable cost.