A EUSO-like experiment as a precursor of a ultra-high energy neutrino Space Observatory
Year: 2018
Authors: Spillantini P., Mazzinghi P., Sandri P.
Autors Affiliation: ASI, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, Via del Politecnico snc, Roma, 00133, Italy; Istituto Nazionale di Ottica, Largo Enrico Fermi, 6, Firenze, 50125, Italy; OHB Italia, Via Arno, 108, Sesto Fiorentino, 50019, Italy
Abstract: In last decade the technology for light mass, deployable and active mirrors for space applications reached a high Technological Readiness Level (TRL), and it is now ripe to he applied to an EUSO-like experiment for observing from space the particle showers produced by ultra-high energy charged CRs and neutrinos in the terrestrial atmosphere. The instrument should compromise between two conflicting requirements to the optical systems: (a) a wide as possible FoV for maximizing the volume of atmosphere observed from an Earth orbit in order to maximize the reachable energy of observed CRs; (b) a wide as possible pupil for maximizing the collected light for reaching down an enough low energy threshold for overlapping with the observations of ground based observatories. The high TRL reached in the realization of light mass, deployable active mirrors promises to improve the performance of the present EUSO project while reaching down an energy threshold of a few tens EeV. Therefore a new EUSO-like experiment should likely allows to observe some cosmogenic neutrino events, their number depending from the distribution and properties of the sources. Besides its main mission of observing ultra high energy CRs (UHECR), it can be considered a precursor or path-finder for addressing the problems to be afforded for the realization of an Observatory of ultra-high energy neutrinos, such as the realization of very large pupil and large FoV optical systems, the optimization of their number in a possible neutrino observatory, and the analysis machinery for identifying the neutrino events in the flood of the charged CR generated events.
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KeyWords: Cosmic rays; cosmogenesis; neutrinos; space telescopes; ultra-high energy particles; ultra-light mirrors