Monday, January 29, 2024

An Organic Neutrino Telescope

The idea of just hooking up instruments to trees in a forest is the most novel approach to developing a high energy neutrino telescope I've seen.
The primary challenge in detecting ultrahigh energy (UHE) neutrinos with energies exceeding 10^16 eV is to instrument a large enough volume to detect the extremely low flux, which falls as ∼E^−2. 
We explore in this article the feasibility of using the forest as a detector. Trees have been shown to be efficient broadband antennas, and may, without damage to the tree, be instrumented with a minimum of apparatus. A large scale array of such trees may be the key to achieving the requisite target volumes for UHE neutrino astronomy.
Steven Prohira, "The forest as a neutrino detector" arXiv:2401.14454 (January 25, 2024).

1 comment:

andrew said...

Commentary from 4Gravitons. https://4gravitons.com/2024/02/09/neu-tree-no-detector/