Speaker
Mr
Jose Luis Navarro
(Universidad de Granada)
Description
The Pierre Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays.
It has the capability of detecting ultra-high energy neutrinos of all flavours above
10$^{17}$ eV. The method adopted is to search for very inclined showers produced
close to the detector. The properties of such showers that start deep in the
atmosphere are different at ground level from those showers initiated in the upper
atmosphere by protons
or nuclei. The neutrino events will have a significant electromagnetic component
leading to a broad time structure of detected signals in water Cherenkov tanks in
contrast to nucleonic-induced showers. In this talk
we present two analyses that are being used to identify neutrino candidates under
different conditions, one for “downward-going” neutrinos and the other for
“Earth-skimming” tau neutrinos. We show that the configuration of the surface
detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory has a satisfactory discrimination power
against the larger background of nucleonic showers over a broad angular range. No
candidates were found on
data collected from 1 January 2004 and a limit on the diffuse neutrino flux is presented.
Primary author
Mr
Jose Luis Navarro
(Universidad de Granada)
