Speaker
Description
The cosmic neutrino background (C$\nu$B) is a population of neutrinos from the early universe that have not been detected. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) can boost the relic neutrinos to higher energies accessible to neutrino telescopes, offering a potential route to observing the C$\nu$B. Several groups have calculated this flux of boosted C$\nu$B neutrinos; however, their predictions disagree by orders of magnitude. For our calculation we offer a self-consistent, data-driven approach where we use the most recent cosmic-ray data from the Pierre Auger Observatory with CRPropa to simulate the cosmogenic and boosted C$\nu$B fluxes together. We find that the boosted C$\nu$B flux lies several orders of magnitude below the cosmogenic neutrino flux, thus any hope of detection would require relic neutrino over-densities roughly $10^{9}$-$10^{10}$ times larger than current cosmological expectations. This makes the boosted C$\nu$B flux practically impossible to detect, even with future neutrino telescopes such as IceCube-Gen2; therefore, we must look towards other methods of detecting the C$\nu$B.