Searches for Point-like Sources of Astrophysical Neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Download or read book Searches for Point-like Sources of Astrophysical Neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmic rays are accelerated to high energies in astrophysical objects, and create neutrinos when interacting with matter or photons. Observing a point source of high-energy astro-physical neutrinos would therefore be a smoking gun signature of cosmic ray acceleration. While evidence for a diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos was recently found, the origin of this flux is not yet known. We present three analyses searching for neutrino point sources with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic kilometer Cherenkov detector located at the geographic South Pole. The analyses target astrophysical sources emitting neutrinos of all flavors, and cover energies from TeV to EeV. The first analysis searches point source emission of muon neutrinos using throughgoing muon tracks. The second analysis searches for spatial clustering among high-energy astrophysical neutrino candidate events, and is sensitive to neutrinos of all three flavors. The third analysis selects starting track events, muon neutrinos with interactions vertices inside the detector, to lower the energy threshold in the southern hemisphere. In each analysis, an un-binned likelihood method tests for spatial clustering of events anywhere in the sky as well as for neutrinos correlated with known gamma-ray sources. All results are consistent with the background-only hypothesis, and the resulting upper limits on E-2 neutrino emission are the most stringent throughout the entire sky. In the northern hemisphere, the upper limits are beginning to constrain emission models. In the southern hemisphere, the upper limits in the 100 TeV energy range are an order of magnitude lower than previous IceCube results, but are not yet probing predicted flux levels. By comparing the point source limits to the observed diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux, we also constrain the minimum number of neutrino sources and investigate the properties of potential source populations contributing to the diffuse flux. Additionally, an a posteriori analysis of one of the highest energy starting track events determined it to be a 2.8 sigma fluctuation above the atmospheric background expectation. While a single event is not indicative of a point source, this is the most significant well-localized astrophysical neutrino candidate yet observed.