The AMANDA neutrino astronomy project

title: Aerogel keystones: Extraction of complete hypervelocity impact events from aerogel collectors
abstract: In January 2006, the Stardust mission will return the first samples from a solid solar system body beyond the Moon and the first samples of contemporary interstellar dust ever collected. Although sophisticated laboratory instruments exist for the analysis of Stardust samples, techniques for the recovery of particles and particle residues from aerogel collectors remain primitive. Here, we describe our recent progress in developing techniques for extracting small volumes of aerogel, which we have called "keystones," which completely contain particle impacts but minimize the damage to the surrounding aerogel collector. These keystones can be fixed to custom-designed micromachined silicon fixtures (so called "microforklifts"). In this configuration, the samples are self-supporting, which can be advantageous in situations where interference from a supporting substrate is undesirable. The keystones may also be extracted and placed onto a substrate without a fixture. We have also demonstrated the capability of homologously crushing these unmounted keystones for analysis techniques that demand flat samples.

title: AMANDA: Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array
abstract: Enormous detectors with unprecedented sensitivity will be required to search for astrophysical sources of neutrinos. If the transparency of deep polar ice is similar to that measured in the laboratory, then AMANDA (Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array) may be the most cost-effective way to reach the detector volumes required to search for astrophysical sources of high energy neutrinos or WIMP annihilation within the sun.

title: Elemental Compositions of Comet 81P/Wild 2 Samples Collected by Stardust
abstract: We measured the elemental compositions of material from 23 particles in aerogel and from residue in seven craters in aluminum foil that was collected during passage of the Stardust spacecraft through the coma of comet 81P/Wild 2. These particles are chemically heterogeneous at the largest size scale analyzed (∼180 ng). The mean elemental composition of this Wild 2 material is consistent with the CI meteorite composition, which is thought to represent the bulk composition of the solar system, for the elements Mg, Si, Mn, Fe, and Ni to 35%, and for Ca and Ti to 60%. The elements Cu, Zn, and Ga appear enriched in this Wild 2 material, which suggests that the CI meteorites may not represent the solar system composition for these moderately volatile minor elements.

title: Ultrahigh-energy neutrino astrophysics with AMANDA

title: Energy loss of relativistic heavy ions in matter
abstract: We have investigated the theory of energy loss of charged particles in matter due to ionization of the medium, integrating the work of other authors over several decades. We describe the most important corrections to standard energy-loss formulae. We compare our calculations to an improved measurement of the range of 1 A GeV U ions and to other codes and tabulations. We show that calculations based on the theory of ionization energy loss are at least as accurate as tabulations extrapolated from empirical data for the stopping of uranium ions in matter. We have made available the computer code resulting from our investigations.

title: Validity of the kink approximation to the tunneling action
abstract: Coleman tunneling in a general scalar potential with two non-degenerate minima is known to have an approximation in terms of a piecewise linear triangular-shaped potential with sharp 'kinks' at the place of the local minima. This approximate potential has a regime where the existence of the bounce solution needs the scalar field to 'wait' for some amount of Euclidean time at one of the 'kinks'. We discuss under which conditions a kink approximation of locally smooth 'cap' regions provides a good estimate for the bounce action.

title: Measurement of quantum states of neutrons in the earth's gravitational field
abstract: The lowest stationary quantum state of neutrons in the Earth's gravitational field is identified in the measurement of neutron transmission between a horizontal mirror on the bottom and an absorber/scatterer on top. Such an assembly is not transparent for neutrons if the absorber height is smaller than the ``height'' of the lowest quantum state.

title: $R^2\log R$ quantum corrections and the inflationary observables
abstract: We study a model of inflation with terms quadratic and logarithmic in the Ricci scalar, where the gravitational action is $f(R)=R+\alpha R^2+\beta R^2 \ln R$. These terms are expected to arise from one loop corrections involving matter fields in curved space-time. The spectral index $n_s$ and the tensor to scalar ratio yield $10^{-4}\lesssim r\lesssim0.03$ and $0.94\lesssim n_s \lesssim 0.99$. i.e. $r$ is an order of magnitude bigger or smaller than the original Starobinsky model which predicted $r\sim 10^{-3}$. Further enhancement of $r$ gives a scale invariant $n_s\sim 1$ or higher. Other inflationary observables are $d n_s/d\ln k \gtrsim -5.2 \times 10^{-4},\, \mu \lesssim 2.1 \times 10^{-8} ,\, y \lesssim 2.6 \times 10^{-9}$. Despite the enhancement in $r$, if the recent BICEP2 measurement stands, this model is disfavoured.

title: Quantum Mechanics and Gravitation
abstract: In summer 1999 an experiment at ILL, Grenoble was conducted. So-called ultra-cold neutrons (UCN) were trapped in the vertical direction between the Fermi-potential of a smooth mirror below and the gravitational potential of the earth above [Ne00, Ru00]. If quantum mechanics turns out to be a sufficiently correct description of the phenomena in the regime of classical, weak gravitation, one should observe the forming of quantized bound states in the vertical direction above a mirror. Already in a simplified view, the data of the experiment provides strong evidence for the existence of such gravitationally bound quantized states. A successful quantum-mechanical description would then provide a convincing argument, that the socalled first quantization can be used for gravitation as an interaction potential, as this is widely expected. Furthermore, looking at the characteristic length scales of about 10 mikron of such bound states formed by UCN, one sees, that a complete quantum mechanical description of this experiment additionally would enable one to check for possible modifications of Newtonian gravitation on distance scales being one order of magnitude below currently available tests [Ad00]. The work presented here deals mainly with the development of a quantum mechanical description of the experiment.

title: Heterotic moduli stabilisation
abstract: A bstractWe perform a systematic analysis of moduli stabilisation for weakly coupled heterotic string theory compactified on internal manifolds which are smooth Calabi-Yau three-folds up to α′ effects. We first review how to stabilise all the geometric and gauge bundle moduli in a supersymmetric way by including fractional fluxes, the requirement of a holomorphic gauge bundle, D-terms, higher order perturbative contributions to the superpotential as well as non-perturbative and threshold effects. We then show that the inclusion of α′ corrections to the Kähler potential leads to new stable Minkowski (or de Sitter) vacua where the complex structure moduli and the dilaton are fixed supersymmetrically at leading order, while the stabilisation of the Kähler moduli at a lower scale leads to spontaneous breaking supersymmetry. The minimum lies at moderately large volumes of all the geometric moduli, at perturbative values of the string coupling and at the right phenomenological value of the GUT gauge coupling. We also provide a dynamical derivation of anisotropic compactifications with stabilised moduli which allow for perturbative gauge coupling unification around 1016 GeV. The value of the gravitino mass can be anywhere between the GUT and the TeV scale depending on the stabilisation of the complex structure moduli. In general, these are fixed by turning on background fluxes, leading to a gravitino mass around the GUT scale since the heterotic three-form flux does not contain enough freedom to tune the superpotential to small values. Moreover accommodating the observed value of the cosmological constant is a challenge. Low-energy supersymmetry could instead be obtained by focusing on particular Calabi-Yau constructions where the gauge bundle is holomorphic only at a point-like sub-locus of complex structure moduli space, or situations with a small number of complex structure moduli (like orbifold models), since in these cases one may fix all the moduli without turning on any quantised background flux. However obtaining the right value of the cosmological constant is even more of a challenge in these cases. Another option would be to focus on compactifications on non-complex manifolds, since these allow for new geometric fluxes which could be used to tune the superpotential as well as the cosmological constant, even if the moduli space of these manifolds is presently only poorly understood.