Atmospheric and Astrophysical Neutrinos above 1 TeV Interacting in IceCube

By M. Aartsen, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, M. Ahrens, D. Altmann, T. Anderson, C. Arguelles, T. Arlen and 294 more. 2014

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was designed primarily to search for high-energy (TeV--PeV) neutrinos produced in distant astrophysical objects. A search for $\gtrsim 100$~TeV neutrinos interacting inside the instrumented volume has recently provided evidence for an isotropic flux of such neutrinos. At lower energies, IceCube collects large numbers of neutrinos from the weak decays of mesons in cosmic-ray air showers. Here we present the results of a search for neutrino interactions inside IceCube's instrumented volume between 1~TeV and 1~PeV in 641 days of data taken from 2010--2012, lowering the energy threshold for neutrinos from the southern sky below 10 TeV for the first time, far below the threshold of the previous high-energy analysis. Astrophysical neutrinos remain the dominant component in the southern sky down to 10 TeV. From these data we derive new constraints on the diffuse astrophysical neutrino spectrum, $\Phi_{\nu} = 2.06^{+0.4}_{-0.3} \times 10^{-18} \left({E_{\nu}}/{10^5 \,\, \rm{GeV}} \right)^{-2.46 \pm 0.12} {\rm {GeV^{-1} \, cm^{-2} \, sr^{-1} \, s^{-1}} } $, as well as the strongest upper limit yet on the flux of neutrinos from charmed-meson decay in the atmosphere, 1.52 times the benchmark theoretical prediction used in previous IceCube results at 90\% confidence.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6aaaeacd11d02b0b811ae7c9f16be421c0458690

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, unknown): “IceCube has already demonstrated several successful strategies for removing this background [2, 15, 21, 403].”
Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger (2017, background): “In a search for muon–neutrino track candidates (Aartsen et al. 2016), and contained neutrino events of any flavor (Aartsen et al. 2015), IceCube identified no neutrinos that were directionally coincident with the final localization of GW170817 at 90% credible level, within ±500 s of the merger…”
SEARCH FOR PROMPT NEUTRINO EMISSION FROM GAMMA-RAY BURSTS WITH ICECUBE (2014, background): “IceCube has recently established (Aartsen et al. 2014b, 2015) the existence of an astrophysical neutrino flux whose sources, like those of the UHECRs, are not yet known.”
KM3MeT 2.0 Letter of intent for ARCA and ORCA (2016, result): “To check the robustness of our results with respect to the diffuse neutrino flux assumed we have also calculated the significance of the KM3NeT/ARCA observation to the following diffuse flux from [46], which is similar to the results recently reported in [14]:”
OBSERVATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF A COSMIC MUON NEUTRINO FLUX FROM THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE USING SIX YEARS OF ICECUBE DATA (2016, methodology): “With this result we have further established the observation of an astrophysical neutrino signal (Aartsen et al. 2013a, 2014b, 2015c) in a second, largely independent detection channel.”
A COMBINED MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD ANALYSIS OF THE HIGH-ENERGY ASTROPHYSICAL NEUTRINO FLUX MEASURED WITH ICECUBE (2015, methodology): “Though the best-fit flavor composition obtained in Aartsen et al. (2015c) (white “+” in Figure 8) lies outside the 95% C.L. region, the 68% C.L. region obtained here is completely contained within that obtained in the previous work, demonstrating the compatibility of the two results.”
All-sky Search for Time-integrated Neutrino Emission from Astrophysical Sources with 7 yr of IceCube Data (2016, methodology): “The second interesting event is a straight down-going starting track at 430 TeV deposited energy(Aartsen et al. 2015f).”
Letter of intent for KM3NeT 2.0 (2016, result): “To check the robustness of our results with respect to the diffuse neutrino flux assumed we have also calculated the significance of the KM3NeT/ARCA observation to the following diffuse flux from [45], which is similar to the results recently reported in [14]: Figure 28.”
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.”