Speaker
Description
The Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland: Status and Science
Neutrinos are powerful probes of both astrophysics and fundamental particle physics at the highest energies. Weakly interacting and uncharged, they propagate undeterred and unabsorbed through the universe. At the highest energies, beyond the PeV scale, current neutrino experiments become too small to observe a sizable flux. Instead, we can use embedded radio experiments which detect the coherent radio emission from neutrino interactions in ice using a sparse array of detectors to build up enormous neutrino targets. Radio detection offers a cost-effective path forward: the long attenuation length of radio waves in ice lets us build sparse arrays sensitive to neutrino interactions across enormous volumes.
The Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland (RNO-G) is a radio neutrino array built around this approach, currently under construction at Summit Station. To date, 12 stations have been deployed and taking data for the past five years and now starting to observe astroparticle physics events. At full scale, RNO-G will comprise 35 hybrid stations, each capable of detecting neutrino-induced signals, reconstructing event properties, and rejecting cosmic-ray backgrounds. In this talk, I will review the current status of construction and commissioning, current results, and future prospects.