Pavel Motloch

On the prospects of ultra-high energy cosmic rays detection by high altitude antennas

Abstract Radio emission from Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) showers detected after specular reflection off the Antarctic ice surface has been recently demonstrated by the ANITA balloon-borne experiment. An antenna observing a large area of ice or water from a mountaintop, a balloon or a satellite may be competitive with more conventional techniques. We present an estimate of the exposure of a high altitude antenna, which provides insight on the prospects of this technique for UHECR detection. We find that a satellite antenna may reach a significantly larger exposure than existing UHECR observatories, but an experimental characterization of the radio reflected signal is required to establish the potential of this approach. A balloon-borne or a mountaintop antenna are found not to be competitive under any circumstances.

Self-accelerating massive gravity: Covariant perturbation theory

We undertake a complete and covariant treatment for the quadratic Lagrangian of all of the degrees of freedom of massive gravity with a fixed flat fiducial metric for arbitrary massive gravity parameters around any isotropic self-accelerating background solution. Generically, 3 out of 4 Stuckelberg degrees of freedom propagate in addition to the usual 2 tensor degrees of freedom of general relativity. The complete kinetic structure typically is only revealed at an order in the graviton mass that is equivalently to retaining curvature terms in a locally flat expansion. These results resolve several apparent discrepancies in the literature where zero degrees of freedom propagate in either special cases or approximate treatments as well as decoupling limit analyses which attempt to count longitudinal degrees of freedom.

Self-accelerating Massive Gravity: Superluminality, Cauchy Surfaces and Strong Coupling

Self-accelerating solutions in massive gravity provide explicit, calculable examples that exhibit the general interplay between superluminality, the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem, and strong coupling. For three particular classes of vacuum solutions, one of which is new to this work, we construct the conformal diagram for the characteristic surfaces on which isotropic stress-energy perturbations propagate. With one exception, all solutions necessarily possess spacelike characteristics, indicating perturbative superluminality. Foliating the spacetime with these surfaces gives a pathological frame where kinetic terms of the perturbations vanish, confusing the Hamiltonian counting of degrees of freedom. This frame dependence distinguishes the vanishing of kinetic terms from strong coupling of perturbations or an ill-posed Cauchy problem. We give examples where spacelike characteristics do and do not originate from a point where perturbation theory breaks down and where spacelike surfaces do or do not intersect all characteristics in the past light cone of a given observer. The global structure of spacetime also reveals issues that are unique to theories with two metrics: in all three classes of solutions, the Minkowski fiducial space fails to cover the entire de Sitter spacetime allowing worldlines of observers to end in finite proper time at determinant singularities. Characteristics run tangent to these surfaces requiring {\it ad hoc} rules to establish continuity across singularities.

Transition radiation at radio frequencies from ultra-high energy neutrino-induced showers

Coherent radiation at radio frequencies from high-energy showers fully contained in a dense radio-transparent medium\char22{}like ice, salt, soil, or regolith\char22{}has been extensively investigated as a promising technique to search for ultrahigh-energy neutrinos. Additional emission in the form of transition radiation may occur when a neutrino-induced shower produced close to the Earths surface emerges from the ground into atmospheric air. We present the first detailed evaluation of transition radiation from high-energy showers crossing the boundary between two different media. We found that transition radiation is sizable over a wide solid angle and coherent up to

CMB lens sample covariance and consistency relations

\ensuremath{\sim}1\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GHz}

Can transition radiation explain the ANITA event 3985267

. These properties encourage further work to evaluate the potential of a large-aperture ultrahigh-energy neutrino experiment based on the detection of transition radiation.

Lens covariance effects on likelihood analyses of CMB power spectra

Gravitational lensing information from the two and higher point statistics of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization fields are intrinsically correlated because they are lensed by the same realization of structure between last scattering and observation. Using an analytic model for lens sample covariance, we show that there is one mode, separately measurable in the lensed CMB power spectra and lensing reconstruction, that carries most of this correlation. Once these measurements become lens sample variance dominated, this mode should provide a useful consistency check between the observables that is largely free of sampling and cosmological parameter errors. Violations of consistency could indicate systematic errors in the data and lens reconstruction or new physics at last scattering, any of which could bias cosmological inferences and delensing for gravitational waves. A second mode provides a weaker consistency check for a spatially flat universe. Our analysis isolates the additional information supplied by lensing in a model-independent manner but is also useful for understanding and forecasting CMB cosmological parameter errors in the extended

Self-accelerating Massive Gravity: Hidden Constraints and Characteristics

\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}

SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS AS COSMIC RAYS DETECTORS

cold dark matter parameter space of dark energy, curvature, and massive neutrinos. We introduce and test a simple but accurate forecasting technique for this purpose that neither double counts lensing information nor neglects lensing in the observables.

Coherent radio emission from the electron beam sudden appearance

We investigate whether transition radiation from a particle shower crossing the interface between Earth and air and induced by an Earth-skimming neutrino can explain the upward event announced recently by the ANITA Collaboration. While the properties of the observed signal can in principle be explained with transition radiation, the flux necessary for a successful explanation is in tension with the current best limits from the Pierre Auger Observatory, the IceCube neutrino detector and the ANITA balloon. We also show that in this scenario, the direction of the incoming neutrino is determined precisely to within a few degrees, from the polarization properties of the observed events and thanks to the Earth opacity to ultra high energy neutrinos.