Measurement of the cosmic ray energy spectrum with IceTop-73

Physical review / D 88(4), 042004 (2013). doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.88.042004

First search for extremely high energy cosmogenic neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

We report on the results of the search for extremely-high energy (EHE) neutrinos with energies above $10^7$ GeV obtained with the partially ($\sim$30%) constructed IceCube in 2007. From the absence of signal events in the sample of 242.1 days of effective livetime, we derive a 90% C.L. model independent differential upper limit based on the number of signal events per energy decade at $E^2 \phi_{\nu_e+\nu_\mu+\nu_\tau}\simeq 1.4 \times 10^{-6}$ GeV cm$^{-2}$ sec$^{-1}$ sr$^{-1}$ for neutrinos in the energy range from $3\times10^7$ to $3\times10^9$ GeV.

The energy spectrum of atmospheric neutrinos between 2 and 200 TeV with the AMANDA-II detector

The muon and anti-muon neutrino energy spectrum is determined from 2000-2003 AMANDA telescope data using regularised unfolding. This is the first measurement of atmospheric neutrinos in the energy range 2 - 200 TeV. The result is compared to different atmospheric neutrino models and it is compatible with the atmospheric neutrinos from pion and kaon decays. No significant contribution from charm hadron decays or extraterrestrial neutrinos is detected. The capabilities to improve the measurement of the neutrino spectrum with the successor experiment IceCube are discussed.

Probing the origin of cosmic-rays with extremely high energy neutrinos using the IceCube Observatory

We have searched for extremely high energy neutrinos using data taken with the IceCube detector between May 2010 and May 2012. Two neutrino induced particle shower events with energies around 1 PeV were observed, as reported previously. In this work, we investigate whether these events could originate from cosmogenic neutrinos produced in the interactions of ultra-high energy cosmic-rays with ambient photons while propagating through intergalactic space. Exploiting IceCube's large exposure for extremely high energy neutrinos and the lack of observed events above 100 PeV, we can rule out the corresponding models at more than 90% confidence level. The model independent quasi-differential 90% …

Measurement of acoustic attenuation in South Pole ice

Using the South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS) and a retrievable transmitter deployed in holes drilled for the IceCube experiment, we have measured the attenuation of acoustic signals by South Pole ice at depths between 190 m and 500 m. Three data sets, using different acoustic sources, have been analyzed and give consistent results. The method with the smallest systematic uncertainties yields an amplitude attenuation coefficient alpha = 3.20 \pm 0.57 km^(-1) between 10 and 30 kHz, considerably larger than previous theoretical estimates. Expressed as an attenuation length, the analyses give a consistent result for lambda = 1/alpha of ~1/300 m with 20% uncertainty. No significant depth or …

First search for atmospheric and extraterrestrial neutrino-induced cascades with the IceCube detector

We report on the first search for atmospheric and for diffuse astrophysical neutrino-induced showers (cascades) in the IceCube detector using 257 days of data collected in the year 2007-2008 with 22 strings active. A total of 14 events with energies above 16 TeV remained after event selections in the diffuse analysis, with an expected total background contribution of $8.3\pm 3.6$. At 90% confidence we set an upper limit of $E^2\Phi_{90%CL}<3.6\times10^{-7} GeV \cdot cm^{-2} \cdot s^{-1}\cdot sr^{-1} $ on the diffuse flux of neutrinos of all flavors in the energy range between 24 TeV and 6.6 PeV assuming that $\Phi \propto E^{-2}$ and that the flavor composition of the $\nu_e : \nu_\mu : \nu…

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 …

ChemInform Abstract: Alkanediyl Bridged Calix(4)arenes: Synthesis, Conformational Analysis, and Rotational Barriers.

The IceProd framework: distributed data processing for the IceCube neutrino observatory

IceCube is a one-gigaton instrument located at the geographic South Pole, designed to detect cosmic neutrinos, identify the particle nature of dark matter, and study high-energy neutrinos themselves. Simulation of the IceCube detector and processing of data require a significant amount of computational resources. This paper presents the first detailed description of IceProd, a lightweight distributed management system designed to meet these requirements. It is driven by a central database in order to manage mass production of simulations and analysis of data produced by the IceCube detector. IceProd runs as a separate layer on top of other middleware and can take advantage of a variety of c…

Calibration and Characterization of the IceCube Photomultiplier Tube

Over 5,000 PMTs are being deployed at the South Pole to compose the IceCube neutrino observatory. Many are placed deep in the ice to detect Cherenkov light emitted by the products of high-energy neutrino interactions, and others are frozen into tanks on the surface to detect particles from atmospheric cosmic ray showers. IceCube is using the 10-inch diameter R7081-02 made by Hamamatsu Photonics. This paper describes the laboratory characterization and calibration of these PMTs before deployment. PMTs were illuminated with pulses ranging from single photons to saturation level. Parameterizations are given for the single photoelectron charge spectrum and the saturation behavior. Time resoluti…

Observation of the cosmic-ray shadow of the Moon with IceCube

We report on the observation of a significant deficit of cosmic rays from the direction of the Moon with the IceCube detector. The study of this "Moon shadow" is used to characterize the angular resolution and absolute pointing capabilities of the detector. The detection is based on data taken in two periods before the completion of the detector: between April 2008 and May 2009, when IceCube operated in a partial configuration with 40 detector strings deployed in the South Pole ice, and between May 2009 and May 2010 when the detector operated with 59 strings. Using two independent analysis methods, the Moon shadow has been observed to high significance (&gt; 6 sigma) in both detector config…

Search for neutrino-induced particle showers with IceCube-40

We report on the search for neutrino-induced particle-showers, so-called cascades, in the IceCube-40 detector. The data for this search was collected between April 2008 and May 2009 when the first 40 IceCube strings were deployed and operational. Three complementary searches were performed, each optimized for different energy regimes. The analysis with the lowest energy threshold (2 TeV) targeted atmospheric neutrinos. A total of 67 events were found, consistent with the expectation of 41 atmospheric muons and 30 atmospheric neutrino events. The two other analyses targeted a harder, astrophysical neutrino flux. The analysis with an intermediate threshold of 25 TeV lead to the observation of…

Determination of the atmospheric neutrino flux and searches for new physics with AMANDA-II

The AMANDA-II detector, operating since 2000 in the deep ice at the geographic South Pole, has accumulated a large sample of atmospheric muon neutrinos in the 100 GeV to 10 TeV energy range. The zenith angle and energy distribution of these events can be used to search for various phenomenological signatures of quantum gravity in the neutrino sector, such as violation of Lorentz invariance (VLI) or quantum decoherence (QD). Analyzing a set of 5511 candidate neutrino events collected during 1387 days of livetime from 2000 to 2006, we find no evidence for such effects and set upper limits on VLI and QD parameters using a maximum likelihood method. Given the absence of evidence for new flavor-…

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.

Measurement of the Atmospheric ve flux in IceCube

We report the first measurement of the atmospheric electron neutrino flux in the energy range between approximately 80 GeV and 6 TeV, using data recorded during the first year of operation of IceCube's DeepCore low energy extension. Techniques to identify neutrinos interacting within the DeepCore volume and veto muons originating outside the detector are demonstrated. A sample of 1029 events is observed in 281 days of data, of which 496 $\pm$ 66(stat.) $\pm$ 88(syst.) are estimated to be cascade events, including both electron neutrino and neutral current events. The rest of the sample includes residual backgrounds due to atmospheric muons and charged current interactions of atmospheric muo…

ERRATUM: "Search for High-Energy Muon Neutrinos from the "Naked-Eye" GRB 080319B with the Icecube Neutrino Telescope" (2009, ApJ, 701, 1721)

We have noticed some mistakes in formulae (A2) and (A5) in the appendix of our paper. The errors are not present in the code used in the analysis and hence none of the plots or results is affected. The correct formulae are below.

Limits on a muon flux from Kaluza-Klein dark matter annihilations in the Sun from the IceCube 22-string detector

A search for muon neutrinos from Kaluza-Klein dark matter annihilations in the Sun has been performed with the 22-string configuration of the IceCube neutrino detector using data collected in 104.3 days of live-time in 2007. No excess over the expected atmospheric background has been observed. Upper limits have been obtained on the annihilation rate of captured lightest Kaluza-Klein particle (LKP) WIMPs in the Sun and converted to limits on the LKP-proton cross-sections for LKP masses in the range 250 -- 3000 GeV. These results are the most stringent limits to date on LKP annihilation in the Sun.

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 $E^2 \phi \leq 3.6 \times 10^{-8}$ ${\rm GeV cm^{-2} sec^{-1}sr^{-1}}$.

Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with IceCube

We present the first statistically significant detection of neutrino oscillations in the high-energy regime ($>$ 20 GeV) from an analysis of IceCube Neutrino Observatory data collected in 2010-2011. This measurement is made possible by the low energy threshold of the DeepCore detector ($\sim 20$ GeV) and benefits from the use of the IceCube detector as a veto against cosmic ray-induced muon background. The oscillation signal was detected within a low-energy muon neutrino sample (20 -- 100 GeV) extracted from data collected by DeepCore. A high-energy muon neutrino sample (100 GeV -- 10 TeV) was extracted from IceCube data to constrain systematic uncertainties. Disappearance of low-energy upw…

An improved method for measuring muon energy using the truncated mean of dE/dx

Nuclear instruments &amp; methods in physics research / A 703, 190 - 198 (2013). doi:10.1016/j.nima.2012.11.081

Search for a diffuse flux of astrophysical muon neutrinos with the IceCube 59-string configuration

A search for high-energy neutrinos was performed using data collected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory from May 2009 to May 2010, when the array was running in its 59-string configuration. The data sample was optimized to contain muon neutrino induced events with a background contamination of atmospheric muons of less than 1%. These data, which are dominated by atmospheric neutrinos, are analyzed with a global likelihood fit to search for possible contributions of prompt atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos, neither of which have yet been identified. Such signals are expected to follow a harder energy spectrum than conventional atmospheric neutrinos. In addition, the zenith angle dist…

South Pole glacial climate reconstruction from multi-borehole laser particulate stratigraphy

AbstractThe IceCube Neutrino Observatory and its prototype, AMANDA, were built in South Pole ice, using powerful hot-water drills to cleanly bore&gt;100 holes to depths up to 2500 m. The construction of these particle physics detectors provided a unique opportunity to examine the deep ice sheet using a variety of novel techniques. We made high-resolution particulate profiles with a laser dust logger in eight of the boreholes during detector commissioning between 2004 and 2010. The South Pole laser logs are among the most clearly resolved measurements of Antarctic dust strata during the last glacial period and can be used to reconstruct paleoclimate records in exceptional detail. Here we use…

Measurement of South Pole ice transparency with the IceCube LED calibration system

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, approximately 1 km^3 in size, is now complete with 86 strings deployed in the Antarctic ice. IceCube detects the Cherenkov radiation emitted by charged particles passing through or created in the ice. To realize the full potential of the detector, the properties of light propagation in the ice in and around the detector must be well understood. This report presents a new method of fitting the model of light propagation in the ice to a data set of in-situ light source events collected with IceCube. The resulting set of derived parameters, namely the measured values of scattering and absorption coefficients vs. depth, is presented and a comparison of IceCube …

Improvement in fast particle track reconstruction with robust statistics

The IceCube project has transformed one cubic kilometer of deep natural Antarctic ice into a Cherenkov detector. Muon neutrinos are detected and their direction inferred by mapping the light produced by the secondary muon track inside the volume instrumented with photomultipliers. Reconstructing the muon track from the observed light is challenging due to noise, light scattering in the ice medium, and the possibility of simultaneously having multiple muons inside the detector, resulting from the large flux of cosmic ray muons. This manuscript describes work on two problems: (1) the track reconstruction problem, in which, given a set of observations, the goal is to recover the track of a muo…

Measurement of the atmospheric neutrino energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 400 TeV with IceCube

A measurement of the atmospheric muon neutrino energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 400 TeV was performed using a data sample of about 18,000 up-going atmospheric muon neutrino events in IceCube. Boosted decision trees were used for event selection to reject mis-reconstructed atmospheric muons and obtain a sample of up-going muon neutrino events. Background contamination in the final event sample is less than one percent. This is the first measurement of atmospheric neutrinos up to 400 TeV, and is fundamental to understanding the impact of this neutrino background on astrophysical neutrino observations with IceCube. The measured spectrum is consistent with predictions for the atmospheric muon ne…

Abstracts of presentations on plant protection issues at the fifth international Mango Symposium Abstracts of presentations on plant protection issues at the Xth international congress of Virology

Search for neutrino-induced cascades with five years of AMANDA data

Contains fulltext : 97339.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) We report on the search for electromagnetic and hadronic showers ("cascades") produced by a diffuse flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos in the AMANDA neutrino telescope. Data for this analysis were recorded during 1001 days of detector livetime in the years 2000-2004. The observed event rates are consistent with the background expectation from atmospheric neutrinos and muons. An upper limit is derived for the diffuse flux of neutrinos of all flavors assuming a flavor ratio of v(e):v(mu):v(tau) = 1:1:1 at the detection site. The all-flavor flux of neutrinos with an energy spectrum Phi proportional to E(-2) is less than 5.0 x…

Common Breast Cancer Susceptibility Alleles and the Risk of Breast Cancer for BRCA1 and BRCA2 Mutation Carriers: Implications for Risk Prediction

Abstract The known breast cancer susceptibility polymorphisms in FGFR2, TNRC9/TOX3, MAP3K1, LSP1, and 2q35 confer increased risks of breast cancer for BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation carriers. We evaluated the associations of 3 additional single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), rs4973768 in SLC4A7/NEK10, rs6504950 in STXBP4/COX11, and rs10941679 at 5p12, and reanalyzed the previous associations using additional carriers in a sample of 12,525 BRCA1 and 7,409 BRCA2 carriers. Additionally, we investigated potential interactions between SNPs and assessed the implications for risk prediction. The minor alleles of rs4973768 and rs10941679 were associated with increased breast cancer risk for BRCA2 carrie…

IceCube search for dark matter annihilation in nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters

Physical review / D 88(12), 122001 (2013). doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.88.122001

Search for Dark Matter Annihilations in the Sun with the 79-String IceCube Detector

We have performed a search for muon neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the center of the Sun with the 79-string configuration of the IceCube neutrino telescope. For the first time, the DeepCore sub-array is included in the analysis, lowering the energy threshold and extending the search to the austral summer. The 317 days of data collected between June 2010 and May 2011 are consistent with the expected background from atmospheric muons and neutrinos. Upper limits are therefore set on the dark matter annihilation rate, with conversions to limits on spin-dependent and spin-independent WIMP-proton cross-sections for WIMP masses in the range 20 - 5000 GeV. These are the most stringent s…