Neutrino flavor discrimination at the highest energies

A. D. SUPANITSKY; G. MEDINA-TANCO

Conferencia; 33RD INTERNATIONAL COSMIC RAY CONFERENCE, RIO DE JANEIRO 2013 THE ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS CONFERENCE; 2013

High energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin are carriers of very important astrophysical information. In particular, they can be produced during the cosmic ray propagation in the intergalactic medium or by their interactions on the acceleration sites. The determination of the flavor composition at the highest energies presents a unique chance to probe our understanding of neutrino flavor oscillations and to search for new fundamental physics in this unexplored energy range. In this work we present a new statistical method specially developed for neutrino flavor identification at the highest energies. It is based on the different multipeak structure present in the longitudinal profiles of very deep electron and tau neutrino horizontal air showers. This technique is more suitable for the observation of the neutrino showers from the space because of the much larger aperture of the orbital fluorescence telescopes compared with ground based ones.