TASI Lectures on Astrophysical Aspects of Neutrinos 3
October25,2018 8:9 WorldScientificReviewVolume-9inx6in tasi Chapter 1 TASI Lectures on Astrophysical Aspects of Neutrinos John F. Beacom Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, Departments of Physics and Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 191 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, OH 43210, USA Neutrino astronomy is on the verge of discovering new sources, and this will lead to important advances in astrophysics, cosmology, par- ticle physics, and nuclear physics. This paper is meant for non-experts, so that they might better understand the basic issues in this field. 1.1. General Introduction It has long been appreciated that neutrino astronomy would have unique advantages. The principal one, due to the weak interactions of neutrinos, is that they would be able to penetrate even great column densities of matter. This could be in dense sources themselves, like stars, supernovae, or active galactic nuclei. It could also be across the universe itself. Of course, the small interaction cross section is also the curse of neutrino astronomy, and arXiv:0706.1824v1 [astro-ph] 13 Jun 2007 to date, only two extraterrestrial sources have been observed: the Sun, and Supernova 1987A. That’s it. However, a new generation of detectors is coming online, and their capa- bilities are significantly better than anything built before. Additionally, a great deal of theoretical effort, taking advantage of the very rapid increases in the quality and quantity of astrophysical data, has refined estimates of the predicted fluxes. The basic message is that the detector capabilities appear to have nearly met the theoretical predictions, and that the next decade should see several exciting first discoveries.
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