Speaker
Description
Cosmic neutrinos are hadronic processes messengers and at high energies provide a clear window into their astrophysical sources. Starting around a PeV, Tau neutrino interactions within the Earth can provide a substantial flux of Earth-emergent tau-leptons which then decay to form upward-moving extensive air showers (EAS). This effectively uses the Earth as a neutrino target and the atmosphere as an optical and radio signal generator to form a detector with >> gigaton mass. nuSpaceSim is an end-to-end simulation that is has been developed to model this neutrino-induced Earth-emergent lepton all the relevant physical processes that describe the neutrino-induced Earth-emergent lepton chain to both design the next generation of balloon- and space-based experiments as well as understand the data from recent experiments such as EUSO-SPB2 and ANITA. The simulation chain includes the modeling of neutrino interactions inside the Earth that generate leptons, propagating the leptons through the Earth into the atmosphere, modeling the tau-lepton decays, forming composite EAS, generating the air optical Cherenkov and radio signals, modeling their propagation and attenuation through the atmosphere (including the effects of clouds and ionosphere), and modeling the response of detectors at an altitude defined by the user. In this talk, the nuSpaceSim software, physics modeling, and the cosmic neutrino measurement capabilities of example sub-orbital and space-based experimental configurations will be presented.
