Speaker
Description
The Hybrid Elevated Radio Observatory for Neutrinos, or HERON, is a new detector concept for ultrahigh energy (E > 100 PeV) neutrinos. HERON consists of 24 compact phased radio arrays embedded within a larger sparse array of 360 standalone antennas, deployed along the side of a ~100 km mountain range in Argentina. The phased arrays provide high sensitivity to the geomagnetic emission of up-going extensive air showers initiated by Earth-skimming tau neutrinos, while the sparse array provides an excellent pointing resolution and offline event reconstruction capabilities. The long in-air propagation length of radio combined with the huge area in-view from each high-altitude site gives HERON a very large instantaneous effective area. HERON will thus have the highest sensitivity to UHE neutrino fluences from short-duration astrophysical transients at the time of its completion. In this talk, we detail the HERON concept, future prototyping and deployment efforts, and the science that will be conducted over the next several years.