First observation of PeV-energy neutrinos with IceCube.

By M. Aartsen, R. Abbasi, Y. Abdou, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, D. Altmann, J. Auffenberg, X. Bai and 273 more. Physical Review Letters, 2013

648 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on the observation of two neutrino-induced events which have an estimated deposited energy in the IceCube detector of 1.04±0.16 and 1.14±0.17 PeV, respectively, the highest neutrino energies observed so far. These events are consistent with fully contained particle showers induced by neutral-current ν(e,μ,τ) (ν(e,μ,τ)) or charged-current ν(e) (ν(e)) interactions within the IceCube detector. The events were discovered in a search for ultrahigh energy neutrinos using data corresponding to 615.9 days effective live time. The expected number of atmospheric background is 0.082±0.004(stat)(-0.057)(+0.041)(syst). The probability of observing two or more candidate events under the atmospheric background-only hypothesis is 2.9×10(-3) (2.8σ) taking into account the uncertainty on the expected number of background events. These two events could be a first indication of an astrophysical neutrino flux; the moderate significance, however, does not permit a definitive conclusion at this time.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/369e698605957bb9b7539caa247ca3520226867e

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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].”
• Neutrino electromagnetic interactions: A window to new physics (2014, background): “In addition, the phenomenon is of interest for astrophysics in light of the recently reported hints of ultra-high energy PeV neutrinos observed by IceCube (Aartsen et al., 2013).”
• Neutrino non-standard interactions: A status report (2019, background): “Eν < 1 PeV energy range that is believed to be astrophysical [414] and extragalactic [415, 416].”
• The IceCube Realtime Alert System (2016, methodology): “The extremely-high-energy (EHE) neutrino alert stream is based on an offline search for GZK, or cosmogenic, neutrinos that resulted in the discovery of the first observed PeV-scale neutrinos [23].”
• Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos (2019, background): “On the other hand, the observations of a number of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrino events ranging from about 30 TeV to about 1 PeV at the IceCube detector [78, 79] confirmed the unique role of cosmic neutrinos as a messenger in probing the depth of the Universe which is opaque to light.”
• Star-forming galaxies as the origin of diffuse high-energy backgrounds: gamma-ray and neutrino connections, and implications for starburst history (2014, background): “Early studies suggested a possible connection to the Glashow resonance [43], but this scenario was later disfavored by a follow-up analysis [33].”