0000000000524078
AUTHOR
T. Denger
A Search for a Diffuse Flux of Astrophysical Muon Neutrinos with the IceCube 40-String Detector
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a 1 km$^{3}$ detector currently taking data at the South Pole. One of the main strategies used to look for astrophysical neutrinos with IceCube is the search for a diffuse flux of high-energy neutrinos from unresolved sources. A hard energy spectrum of neutrinos from isotropically distributed astrophysical sources could manifest itself as a detectable signal that may be differentiated from the atmospheric neutrino background by spectral measurement. This analysis uses data from the IceCube detector collected in its half completed configuration which operated between April 2008 and May 2009 to search for a diffuse flux of astrophysical muon neutrinos. A to…
Background studies for acoustic neutrino detection at the South Pole
The detection of acoustic signals from ultra-high energy neutrino interactions is a promising method to measure the tiny flux of cosmogenic neutrinos expected on Earth. The energy threshold for this process depends strongly on the absolute noise level in the target material. The South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS), deployed in the upper part of four boreholes of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, has monitored the noise in Antarctic ice at the geographic South Pole for more than two years down to 500 m depth. The noise is very stable and Gaussian distributed. Lacking an in-situ calibration up to now, laboratory measurements have been used to estimate the absolute noise level in the 10 to …
Search for dark matter from the Galactic halo with the IceCube neutrino telescope
Self-annihilating or decaying dark matter in the Galactic halo might produce high energy neutrinos detectable with neutrino telescopes. We have conducted a search for such a signal using 276 days of data from the IceCube 22-string configuration detector acquired during 2007 and 2008. The effect of halo model choice in the extracted limit is reduced by performing a search that considers the outer halo region and not the Galactic Center. We constrain any large-scale neutrino anisotropy and are able to set a limit on the dark matter self-annihilation cross section of ⟨σAv⟩≃10-22 cm3 s-1 for weakly interacting massive particle masses above 1 TeV, assuming a monochromatic neutrino line spectrum.
Constraints on the extremely-high energy cosmic neutrino flux with the IceCube 2008-2009 data
We report on a search for extremely-high energy neutrinos with energies greater than $10^6$ GeV using the data taken with the IceCube detector at the South Pole. The data was collected between April 2008 and May 2009 with the half completed IceCube array. The absence of signal candidate events in the sample of 333.5 days of livetime significantly improves model independent limit from previous searches and allows to place a limit on the diffuse flux of cosmic neutrinos with an $E^{-2}$ spectrum in the energy range $2.0 \times 10^{6}$ $-$ $6.3 \times 10^{9}$ GeV to a level of $E^2 \phi \leq 3.6 \times 10^{-8}$ ${\rm GeV cm^{-2} sec^{-1}sr^{-1}}$.