A Tale of Three Neutrinos
Date: Wed. October 29th, 2014, 11:00 am-1:00 amLocation: Sears 552
A Tale of Three Neutrinos
Derek Fox, Penn State University
I will discuss recent work to identify the brightest sources of high-energy (e_nu > TeV) neutrinos in the cosmos, those amenable to detection by IceCube, ANTARES, and other high-energy neutrino facilities. In our first tale, a neutrino produced in the high energy-density, high Lorentz-factor outflow of a gamma-ray burst arrives in coincidence with the high-energy photons from that event. While these photons might trigger a burst detection by Swift or another GRB mission, they might alternatively fail to trigger; I will discuss how the Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network under development at Penn State would help to identify these subthreshold coincidences. In the second tale, a neutrino produced in the expanding shockwave of a type IIn supernova is detected as that supernova approaches its maximum X-ray and radio luminosity, months after its original discovery by the Palomar Transient Factory or another wide-area optical survey. Finally, in the third tale, a very high-energy (e_nu > 50 TeV) neutrino produced in the still-energetic shock of a hundred thousand year-old hypernova remnant arrives at Earth, and points back at the location of one of the most energetic past stellar explosions within our Galaxy.