OBSERVATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF A COSMIC MUON NEUTRINO FLUX FROM THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE USING SIX YEARS OF ICECUBE DATA
By I. C. M. Aartsen, K. Abraham, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, M. Ahrens, D. Altmann, K. Andeen, T. Anderson and 301 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2016
396 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The IceCube Collaboration has previously discovered a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux using neutrino events with interaction vertices contained within the instrumented volume of the IceCube detector. We present a complementary measurement using charged current muon neutrino events where the interaction vertex can be outside this volume. As a consequence of the large muon range the effective area is significantly larger but the field of view is restricted to the Northern Hemisphere. IceCube data from 2009 through 2015 have been analyzed using a likelihood approach based on the reconstructed muon energy and zenith angle. At the highest neutrino energies between and a significant astrophysical contribution is observed, excluding a purely atmospheric origin of these events at significance. The data are well described by an isotropic, unbroken power-law flux with a normalization at neutrino energy of and a hard spectral index of . The observed spectrum is harder in comparison to previous IceCube analyses with lower energy thresholds which may indicate a break in the astrophysical neutrino spectrum of unknown origin. The highest-energy event observed has a reconstructed muon energy of which implies a probability of less than for this event to be of atmospheric origin. Analyzing the arrival directions of all events with reconstructed muon energies above no correlation with known γ-ray sources was found. Using the high statistics of atmospheric neutrinos we report the current best constraints on a prompt atmospheric muon neutrino flux originating from charmed meson decays which is below 1.06 in units of the flux normalization of the model in Enberg et al.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06abeb4a1ece9d05e3117e898c15ed358b3d062f
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Citations in the corpus
- Where are we with light sterile neutrinos? (2019, background): “At higher energies, it becomes a combination of prompt and astrophysical neutrino fluxes [114, 115].”
- Extending the Search for Muon Neutrinos Coincident with Gamma-Ray Bursts in IceCube Data (2017, methodology): “Combined with the previously published four-year northern hemisphere track (Aartsen et al. 2015d) and three-year all-sky cascade(Aartsen et al. 2016a) analyses, the stacked analysis has a final significance of p=0.60, consistent with the background-only hypothesis.”
- Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A (2018, background): “S ince the discovery of a diffuse flux of highenergy astrophysical neutrinos (1, 2), IceCube has searched for its sources.”
- All-sky Search for Time-integrated Neutrino Emission from Astrophysical Sources with 7 yr of IceCube Data (2016, methodology): “In the southern sky, an additional selection of starting tracks, which has a greatly reduced background rate, is performed in order to access lower energies(Aartsen et al. 2016a).”
- IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, background): “The grey band represents the range of neutrino fluxes obtained in [15, 37].”
- The IceCube Realtime Alert System (2016, background): “The detection of a diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos by IceCube [1, 2] with no clearly identified sources further motivates a multimessenger approach.”