Nathan Whitehorn (Michigan State) "What is up with the neutrino sky?"
3:30–4:30 pm ERC 161
Nathan Whitehorn (Michigan State) "What is up with the neutrino sky?"
In 2013, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory announced the first measurement of a bright flux of very high-energy (> 100 TeV) neutrinos of unknown origin coming from beyond the Earth's atmosphere. These neutrinos appear to come almost entirely from beyond our galaxy and, as the universe is opaque to light at these energies, represent our first glimpse of the distant, ultra-high-energy universe. Over the last decade, as we have learned more and more, it has become increasingly apparent that that glimpse is telling us something unexpected: that the sources of these high-energy particles are not what we thought they were and that the neutrino sky is not the one that we are used to. New approaches, and new detectors built along different lines than IceCube, will be needed to resolve this puzzle. In this talk, I will describe the current state of our knowledge of the neutrino universe, how we got there, and the next steps for the field.