The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations : A Long-duration Balloon-borne Instrument for Particle Astrophysics at the Highest Energies

KEY OBJECTIVES: We propose the newly-designed Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO), which will characterize the most energetic astrophysical sources at cosmic distances. PUEO detects radio emission from interactions of extremely high energy particles, including neutrinos and cosmic rays. PUEO is especially well-suited for discovering the highest energy neutrinos and searching for transient bursts of neutrinos. By viewing the largest target volumes for neutrino interactions, balloon-borne experiments such as PUEO are uniquely positioned to probe the highest energies, where the neutrinos are the most scarce. PUEO will have the world's best sensitivity to neutrinos in an energy regime where many sources that accelerate cosmic rays might reach their ultimate energy and will have the best sensitivity to explosive outflows of neutrinos from sources within its field-of-view, including possible sources of gravitational waves. With PUEO, we will characterize the cosmic populations of the highest energy accelerators through two main science objectives: (1) diffuse and (2) transient observations of neutrinos. METHODS AND TECHNIQUES: The PUEO design is based on direct heritage from the highly successful Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) payload, which has completed four successful long-duration balloon flights over the past two decades and has placed the most stringent constraints on the flux of neutrinos at the highest energies. ANITA's constraints have eliminated some flux models from strong redshift evolutions, hard astrophysical spectra, and high maximum energies, but the heart of the expected range has not been within ANITA's reach. ANITA also observed ultrahigh energy (UHE) cosmic rays via geomagnetic emission produced in the Earth's atmosphere, and has seen a handful of events that are consistent with radio emission from upward-going particle air showers, similar to the type of signature expected for UHE tau neutrinos. ANITA has also carried out targeted searches for neutrinos from source targets, including Gamma Ray Bursts and the TXS 0506+056 blazar, exploiting the immense instantaneous target area uniquely viewed by ANITA for all three neutrino flavors. A single flight of PUEO will provide an order-of-magnitude increase in sensitivity above 10^19 eV over the combined ANITA sensitivity from all four flights, and will provide the world's best sensitivity to the high energy neutrino flux above 10^18 eV. We achieve this improvement by leveraging critical recent technology advancements, implementing a coherent phased array approach to triggering the system, and maximizing antenna effective area in the heart of the detection region. PUEO also includes a new Low Frequency instrument that provides additional background rejection and reconstruction capabilities, and is important for diffuse searches, point source, transient, and tau neutrino searches. In pointing the antennas towards the horizon and through broad radio frequency coverage, PUEO is suited for searching for neutrinos via the Askaryan effect in ice and for Earth-skimming tau neutrinos via geomagnetic emission. We will build carefully on the existing ANITA gondola and its infrastructure, to enable a smooth transition to a significantly more science-capable payload in PUEO. PERCEIVED SIGNIFICANCE: Neutrinos of cosmogenic or astrophysical origin have not yet been detected at energies beyond those reported by IceCube, and the origin of IceCube's neutrinos may be unconnected to what is in store in the UHE regime. PUEO's detection of, or stringent constraints on, this flux will have immediate and important consequences on our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, specifically our understanding of the nature of the UHE accelerators. PUEO will be an observatory-class suborbital mission, and a premier instrument for measurements of the highest energy particles in the universe.

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