Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Project

High energy Neutrino Telescopes offer a unique window to the Universe by observing neutrinos over a wide energy range and origins. Using neutrinos produced when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, Neutrino Telescopes serve as tools for fundamental particle physics. This natural beam of neutrinos has been used to study the details of neutrino oscillations, a quantum mechanical process over macroscopic distances, to understand the details of how neutrinos interact with matter, and to look for new phenomena like evidence of dark matter or new neutrino states. Despite the wide range of studies that they can perform, Neutrino Telescopes are surprisingly simple. They consist of an array of light sensors deployed deep in an optically transparent medium. The flux of the high energy neutrinos of interest is small, but due to their energy they leave signatures over volumes from tens of meters to kilometers, so detectors can sparsely instrument volumes of cubic-kilometers to realize these observations. Here we propose continuing the Canadian activities in IceCube, the most successful neutrino telescope to date, while simultaneously leading the efforts to deploy the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Explorer (P-ONE), a new detector off the coast of Vancouver Island. IceCube is situated at the geographic South Pole and it has been collecting data for 12 years. Among its most notable achievements, it discovered the existence of an astrophysical neutrino flux, has started to observe potential candidates for the origin of that flux, and has precisely measured neutrino oscillations. The detector will be further enhanced in 2026 to improve our interpretation of the data already collected. In this proposal we will analyze the IceCube data already collected, and will study how to incorporate the upcoming information from this upgrade. We know, however, that IceCube is too small to truly explore the properties and origin of the high energy cosmic neutrino flux. We need more detectors that can be easily scaled to do this. P-ONE is an exciting opportunity that we have in Canada. Ocean Networks Canada already operates a deep ocean observatory in the Pacific, which can host a new neutrino telescope. The properties of the site are suitable for such an experiment, and we now want to build the P-ONE Demonstrator to show that a large experiment is indeed possible. This would pave the way for building a multi-km3 detector in Canada.