Methods for point source analysis in high energy neutrino telescopes

By J. Braun, J. Dumm, F. Palma, C. Finley, A. Karle, T. Montaruli. 2008

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Neutrino telescopes are moving steadily toward the goal of detecting astrophysical neutrinos from the most powerful galactic and extragalactic sources. Here we describe analysis methods to search for high energy point-like neutrino sources using detectors deep in the ice or sea. We simulate an ideal cubic kilometer detector based on real world performance of existing detectors such as AMANDA, IceCube, and ANTARES. An unbinned likelihood ratio method is applied, making use of the point spread function and energy distribution of simulated neutrino signal events to separate them from the background of atmospheric neutrinos produced by cosmic ray showers. The unbinned point source analyses are shown to perform better than binned searches and, depending on the source spectral index, the use of energy information is shown to improve discovery potential by almost a factor of two.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a148f0346b1ed399328c3595ec501aa47f1d8f8

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Citations in the corpus

• KM3MeT 2.0 Letter of intent for ARCA and ORCA (2016, methodology): “The significance has been evaluated with an unbinned method [64] by maximising the likelihood ratio of Eq.”
• All-sky Search for Time-integrated Neutrino Emission from Astrophysical Sources with 7 yr of IceCube Data (2016, background): “Because of small event statistics at the position of the likelihood maximization and limited energy resolution of the neutrino energy (compare Section 2.2), uncertainties on the spectral index are of the order of±1 and reduce to ±0.5 for values of nS of ∼15 and ∼50, respectively(Braun et al. 2008).”
• The IceCube Realtime Alert System (2016, unknown): “A maximum-likelihood based search for point sources [42] is paired with a time-clustering search algorithm [43] to search for neutrino bursts from a”
• SEARCH FOR PROMPT NEUTRINO EMISSION FROM GAMMA-RAY BURSTS WITH ICECUBE (2014, methodology): “We use an unbinned maximum likelihood analysis based on Braun et al. (2008) to test for a correlation between GRBs and neutrino events.”
• Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector (2013, methodology): “To search for spatial clustering, indicating possible neutrino sources, we conducted a maximum likelihood point source analysis (14).”
• Letter of intent for KM3NeT 2.0 (2016, methodology): “The significance has been evaluated with an unbinned method [63] by maximising the likelihood ratio of equation (2), with PDFs expressed as functions of the BDT output (figure 41).”