Frontiers in Neutrino Astrophysics

Call for Papers

The era of the kilometer scale neutrino observatory has dawned since the recent completion of IceCube. New initiatives including the development of radio Askaryan arrays and the construction of DeepCore promise to push the frontiers of neutrino astrophysics to both higher and lower energies. The detector KM3NeT of the similar size to IceCube is also under development, which provides complementary sky coverage.

The motivation to build higher energy arrays arises from the expectation of cosmogenic neutrino flux produced by GZK interactions. The spectral shape and the normalization of such a flux depend on the chemical composition and the initial spectrum of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECR) and the cosmological evolution of UHECR sources. Planned Askaryan arrays can achieve sensitivity to the cosmogenic neutrino flux even for a pessimistic scenario of flux normalization. For proton-dominated UHECR with standard source evolution, dozens of neutrino events can be expected for a decade of data taking. With such a neutrino event rate, one may probe UHECR source properties by combining neutrino flux measurements with measurements by Pierre Auger Observatory and Telescope Array on UHECR spectrum and composition. We also note that the cosmogenic neutrino flux has an energy-independent flavor ratio at the source. Hence this flux could be used to test neutrino flavor transition mechanisms provided the flavor discrimination capability of the neutrino telescope is known.

On the low energy frontier of neutrino telescopes, the installation of the DeepCore array significantly improves the rejection of down going atmospheric muons in IceCube and lowers the threshold energy for neutrino detections to about 5 GeV. These improvements enable the observations of neutrinos from galactic point sources and galactic dark-matter annihilations/decays. It is important to study these signatures in details, including the estimation of background event rate from atmospheric neutrinos. Such studies can be extended to KM3NeT as well.

We invite authors to contribute original as well as review articles. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Flavor discrimination in radio-wave detections of ultrahigh energy neutrinos
• Probing neutrino flavor transitions using cosmogenic neutrino flux as the beam source
• Determination of UHECR source properties using cosmic ray and neutrino data
• Studies of atmospheric neutrino event rates in the accessible energy range of DeepCore array for all zenith angles
• Indirect detection of dark matter with neutrino telescopes

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ahep/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Guey-Lin Lin, Institute of Physics, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan

Guest Editors

• Kara Hoffman, Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-4111, USA
• Danny Marfatia, Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-7582, USA
• Miguel Mostafa, Department of Physics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1875, USA