The RESUN (Radio EVLA Search for UHE Neutrinos) project is designed to search for ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic neutrinos by detecting short-duration Cerenkov radio bursts from the Moon. The observational program uses the NSF's Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) radio telescope in New Mexico, with a high-speed data acquisition and pulse coincidence detection system using specialized hardware developed at the Center for Astronomical Signal Processing and Electronics Research laboratory. Understanding the physics of energetic extragalactic sources is one of the most important and intensely studied goals in current astrophysics. A large number of experiments, currently operating or being planned, will search for ultra-high energy neutrinos, using both the Moon and the Antarctic ice shelf as targets. The RESUN project probes an energy range above the terrestrial-target experiments and will provide at least a new upper limit on the neutrino flux there, if not an actual detection. Any detection would be very exciting and possibly transformative: even a limit will constrain certain models of the decay of super-massive particles and of neutrino production by topological defects. A pilot project has already demonstrated the viability of this search.
The search for UHE neutrinos spans several disciplines, including observational radio astronomy, and theoretical and high-energy astrophysics. There is a definite benefit to training graduate and undergraduate students in state of the art data acquisition instrumentation as well as software and analysis techniques appropriate to current and planned astronomical facilities.
