21–26 Jun 2026
University of California, Irvine
US/Pacific timezone

Energy-fluence reconstruction for UHE neutrinos and cosmic rays in GRAND using Rician likelihoods and physics-informed GNNs

Not scheduled
20m
Conference Center (University of California, Irvine)

Conference Center

University of California, Irvine

Poster Astrophysical Neutrinos Poster session 2

Speaker

Ryan Thong

Description

Reconstructing the energy fluence of UHE neutrinos and cosmic rays is a crucial challenge for the Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND) and similar radio arrays. Because radio noise has random phase, signal plus noise can interfere constructively or destructively, so conventional time-domain noise subtraction can yield non-physical negative fluences and underestimates uncertainties. Building on a recently proposed Rice-distribution likelihood for voltage magnitudes, we compute the energy-fluence summaries for each antenna and feed them, together with trigger time, polarization, and geometry, into a physics-informed graph neural network. Our machine-learning model is regularized by a forward model of the radio footprint where we isolate the geomagnetic component and fit a one-dimensional lateral distribution function in shower coordinates, restricting solutions to physically viable patterns and improving generalization. In this poster contribution, we will show (on ZHAireS simulations) that our approach achieves competitive energy-fluence resolution without ad-hoc SNR cuts while leveraging all triggered antennas.

Authors

Presentation materials