Double Extensive Air Shower Induced by Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Tau-Neutrino

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of detecting cosmic ultra-high energy tau-neutrinos by means of a process involving a double extensive air shower, the so-called Double-Bang Phenomenon. In this process a primary tau-neutrino interacts with an atmospheric quark creating a first hadronic shower and a tau-lepton, which subsequently decays creating a second cascade. The number of these events strongly depends on the flux of tau-neutrinos arriving at the Earth's atmosphere and can be used to test some theoretical models related to the production of ultra-high energy tau-neutrinos. We estimate the potential of the fluorescence detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory to observe Double-Bang events. We conclude that for tau-neutrinos with energies ranging from ~ 0.1 EeV to ~ 10 EeV the number of detected events vary from hundreds in a year to only few events in hundreds of years.