0000000000342219
AUTHOR
J. N. Bahcall
Limits on the high-energy gamma and neutrino fluxes from the SGR 1806-20 giant flare of 27 December 2004 with the AMANDA-II detector.
On December 27th 2004, a giant gamma flare from the Soft Gamma-ray Repeater 1806-20 saturated many satellite gamma-ray detectors. This event was by more than two orders of magnitude the brightest cosmic transient ever observed. If the gamma emission extends up to TeV energies with a hard power law energy spectrum, photo-produced muons could be observed in surface and underground arrays. Moreover, high-energy neutrinos could have been produced during the SGR giant flare if there were substantial baryonic outflow from the magnetar. These high-energy neutrinos would have also produced muons in an underground array. AMANDA-II was used to search for downgoing muons indicative of high-energy gamm…
Search for Neutrino‐induced Cascades from Gamma‐Ray Bursts with AMANDA
Using the neutrino telescope AMANDA-II, we have conducted two analyses searching for neutrino-induced cascades from gamma-ray bursts. No evidence of astrophysical neutrinos was found, and limits are presented for several models. We also present neutrino effective areas which allow the calculation of limits for any neutrino production model. The first analysis looked for a statistical excess of events within a sliding window of 1 or 100 seconds (for short and long burst classes, respectively) during the years 2001-2003. The resulting upper limit on the diffuse flux normalization times E^2 for the Waxman-Bahcall model at 1 PeV is 1.6 x 10^-6 GeV cm^-2 s^-1 sr^-1 (a factor of 120 above the the…
The IceCube prototype string in Amanda
The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (Amanda) is a high-energy neutrino telescope. It is a lattice of optical modules (OM) installed in the clear ice below the South Pole Station. Each OM contains a photomultiplier tube (PMT) that detects photons of Cherenkov light generated in the ice by muons and electrons. IceCube is a cubic-kilometer-sized expansion of Amanda currently being built at the South Pole. In IceCube the PMT signals are digitized already in the optical modules and transmitted to the surface. A prototype string of 41 OMs equipped with this new all-digital technology was deployed in the Amanda array in the year 2000. In this paper we describe the technology and demonst…
IceCube: A multipurpose neutrino telescope
IceCube is a new high-energy neutrino telescope which will be coming online in the near future. IceCube will be capable of measuring fluxes of all three flavors of neutrino, and its peak neutrino energy sensitivity will be in the TeV–PeV range. Here, after a brief description of the detector, we describe its anticipated performance with a selection of physics topics: supernovae, extraterrestrial diffuse and point sources of neutrinos, gamma-ray bursts, neutrinos from WIMP annihilation, and cosmic ray composition.