https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201920901005
Search for tau neutrinos with the MAGIC telescopes: improving selection criteria*
1 University of Rijeka, Department of Physics, 51000 Rijeka
2 Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), D-15738 Zeuthen, Germany
3 Humboldt University of Berlin, Institut für Physik D-12489 Berlin Germany
4 Università di Padova and INFN, I-35131 Padova, Italy
5 Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences, PL-31342 Krakow, Poland
6 Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, D-80805 München, Germany
7 the full list of MAGIC members is available at: wwwmagic.mppmu.mpg.de
* original title was: Search for tau neutrinos with the MAGIC telescopes: the quest continues
a e-mail: marina.manganaro@phy.uniri.hr
Published online: 13 May 2019
MAGIC, a system of two Cherenkov telescopes located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (2200 a.s.l.) in the Canary Island of La Palma, has lately been engaged in an unconventional task: the search for a signature of particle showers induced by earth-skimming cosmic tau neutrinos arising from the ocean, in the PeV to EeV energy range. When pointing at the sea, the MAGIC telescopes can collect data in a range of about 5 deg in zenith and 80 deg in azimuth: the analysis of the shower images from ~30 hours of data, together with the simulations of upward-going tau neutrino showers, shows that the air showers induced by tau neutrinos can be discriminated from the hadronic background coming from a similar direction. We have calculated the point source acceptance and the expected event rates, assuming an incoming v flux consistent with IceCube measurements, and for a sample of generic neutrino fluxes from photohadronic interactions in AGNs and GRBs. A 90% C.L. upper limit on the tau-neutrino point source flux of 2.0 × 10–4 GeV cm–2 s–1 has been obtained. The presented results can also be important for future Cherenkov experiments such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array. This next generation ground-based observatory can have a much better possibility to detect v, given its larger FOV and much larger effective area.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
