The IceCube Realtime Alert System

By I. C. M. Aartsen, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, M. Ahrens, D. Altmann, K. Andeen, T. Anderson, I. Ansseau and 293 more. 2016

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Following the detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013, their origin is still unknown. Aiming for the identification of an electromagnetic counterpart of a rapidly fading source, we have implemented a realtime analysis framework for the IceCube neutrino observatory. Several analyses selecting neutrinos of astrophysical origin are now operating in realtime at the detector site in Antarctica and are producing alerts to the community to enable rapid follow-up observations. The goal of these observations is to locate the astrophysical objects responsible for these neutrino signals. This paper highlights the infrastructure in place both at the South Pole detector site and at IceCube facilities in the north that have enabled this fast follow-up program to be developed. Additionally, this paper presents the first realtime analyses to be activated within this framework, highlights their sensitivities to astrophysical neutrinos and background event rates, and presents an outlook for future discoveries.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/793a973e027db5afccd70c2d4f0c058fd94256b7

How researchers see this paper

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

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

A Multimessenger Picture of the Flaring Blazar TXS 0506+056: Implications for High-energy Neutrino Emission and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration (2018, methodology): “Real-time 18 AMON website: https://www.amon.psu.edu/. identification, localization, and reporting of IceCube HE neutrinos is enabled by software that has been in place at the South Pole since 2016 April (Aartsen et al. 2017a).”
IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, background): “First, the high-energy neutrino alerts released by IceCube’s realtime program [170] can be followed up with optical instruments to search for potential optical counterparts of the signatures described above.”
The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives (2019, background): “However, until recently no compelling evidence for spatial or temporal clustering of events had been identified and the origin of the neutrinos was unknown (Aartsen et al. 2017a; Aartsen et al. 2015).”
Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A (2018, background): “To take advantage of multimessenger opportunities, the IceCube neutrino observatory (13) has established a system of real-time alerts that rapidly notify the astronomical community of the direction of astrophysical neutrino candidates (14).”
The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results (2018, methodology): “The neutrino was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, and was distributed as part of the IceCube Realtime Program (Aartsen et al. 2017).”