Could ANITA anomaly be due to dark cosmic rays (in TGD sense)?

ANITA, a balloon-borne radio detector flying over Antarctica was designed to detect neutrinos. Recently, it has however detected something totally unexpected: strange radio pulses rising from beneath the ice (see this). The strange radio waves detected by ANITA came from way below the ice, at angles so steep -about 30 degrees – that they should have traveled through thousands of kilometers of solid rock. Standard physics does not allow this. Pierre Auger Collaboration has carried out a search for the counterparts of events similar to those detected fy ANITA (see this).

The first particle physics based guess would be that the radio wave pulses originated from a collision of ultrahigh energy neutrinos propagating through the Earth. The neutrino would have interacted with the condensed matter creating relativistic particles, which give rise coherent Cerenkov radiation (see this) at radio wave frequencies. A backwards directed cone at which the emission is maximal would be created. Sonic boom occurring as an object moves with a velocity larger than the sound velocity of the medium is a good analogy.

The Cerenkov radiation is created in condensed matter at energies, which correspond to the frequencies associated with core electronic transitions in condensed matter since the refractive index n is smaller than 1 below these frequencies so that the phase velocity v_ph= c/n is smaller than c and therefore below the velocity of the particle. These frequencies correspond to radio frequencies so that the primary signals need not be at radio frequencies.

The interpretation of the events in terms of UHE neutrinos fails. The distance travelled by the neutrino inside the Earth should be 6000-7000 km. The interpretation in terms of ultra heavy neutrinos with energies in the range of .2 EeV (.2 × 10¹⁸ eV) requires that the neutrino should have travelled 10-12 interaction lengths so that the probability of the events creating the shower by the resulting tau leptons is quite too small. New physics seems to be involved. Particle physicists would propose new extremely weakly interacting particles, perhaps dark matter particles decaying to ordinary particles.

TGD (see for instance this and this) predicts the existence of a hierarchy of phases of ordinary matter with non-standard value of Planck constant h_eff, which can be very large so that these phases are quantum coherent in long length scales. These phases behave like dark matter and would reside at the field/magnetic bodies, which are the TGD counterpart for classical fields.

These new phases need not have anything to do with the galactic dark matter in the TGD framework: galactic dark matter would be analogous to dark energy and correspond to magnetic and volume energy associated with what I call cosmic strings (see this). The observed disappearance of baryonic matter during the cosmic evolution could correspond to a gradual transformation of ordinary protons to dark protons at the field bodies. The h_eff>h phases, in particular dark protons and dark photons, are the key players in the TGD inspired quantum biology (see this, this and this).

These (effectively) dark particles could propagate along the field (magnetic) body of the Earth and would have a scaled up interaction length proportional to h_eff/h>1. Their transformation to ordinary particles with h_eff=h would generate the shower. Also the transformation of dark photons to ordinary photons could create pairs of charged particles and lead to a generation of showers.

The identification of dark particles as dark variants of cosmic rays could also explain the unexpected finding of James Webb telescope of very distant galaxies (see this). In standard cosmology, these galaxies should not be visible. Could the dark radiation arrive along monopole flux tubes connecting stars to the galactic center or even galactic blackhole?

This explanation is of course only the first guess and a lot of work is needed to check whether it works at a quantitative level.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.