Search results for "Neutrino astronomy"
showing 10 items of 85 documents
Sensitivity of the IceCube detector to astrophysical sources of high energy muon neutrinos
2003
We present the results of a Monte-Carlo study of the sensitivity of the planned IceCube detector to predicted fluxes of muon neutrinos at TeV to PeV energies. A complete simulation of the detector and data analysis is used to study the detector's capability to search for muon neutrinos from sources such as active galaxies and gamma-ray bursts. We study the effective area and the angular resolution of the detector as a function of muon energy and angle of incidence. We present detailed calculations of the sensitivity of the detector to both diffuse and pointlike neutrino emissions, including an assessment of the sensitivity to neutrinos detected in coincidence with gamma-ray burst observatio…
Observation of high-energy neutrinos using Cerenkov detectors embedded deep in Antarctic ice.
2001
Neutrinos are elementary particles that carry no electric charge and have little mass. As they interact only weakly with other particles, they can penetrate enormous amounts of matter, and therefore have the potential to directly convey astrophysical information from the edge of the Universe and from deep inside the most cataclysmic high-energy regions. The neutrino's great penetrating power, however, also makes this particle difficult to detect. Underground detectors have observed low-energy neutrinos from the Sun and a nearby supernova2, as well as neutrinos generated in the Earth's atmosphere. But the very low fluxes of high-energy neutrinos from cosmic sources can be observed only by mu…
Observation of high energy atmospheric neutrinos with the Antarctic muon and neutrino detector array
2002
The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) began collecting data with ten strings in 1997. Results from the first year of operation are presented. Neutrinos coming through the Earth from the Northern Hemisphere are identified by secondary muons moving upward through the array. Cosmic rays in the atmosphere generate a background of downward moving muons, which are about 10^6 times more abundant than the upward moving muons. Over 130 days of exposure, we observed a total of about 300 neutrino events. In the same period, a background of 1.05*10^9 cosmic ray muon events was recorded. The observed neutrino flux is consistent with atmospheric neutrino predictions. Monte Carlo simulat…
Atmospheric neutrino oscillations and tau neutrinos in ice
2010
The main goal of the IceCube Deep Core Array is to search for neutrinos of astrophysical origins. Atmospheric neutrinos are commonly considered as a background for these searches. We show here that cascade measurements in the Ice Cube Deep Core Array can provide strong evidence for tau neutrino appearance in atmospheric neutrino oscillations. Controlling systematic uncertainties will be the limiting factor in the analysis. A careful study of these tau neutrinos is crucial, since they constitute an irreducible background for astrophysical neutrino detection.
Search for dark matter in the Sun with the ANTARES neutrino telescope in the CMSSM and mUED frameworks
2012
ANTARES is the first neutrino telescope in the sea. It consists of a three-dimensional array of 885 photomultipliers to collect the Cherenkov light induced by relativistic muons produced in CC interactions of high energy neutrinos. One of the main scientific goals of the experiment is the search for dark matter. We present here the analysis of data taken during 2007 and 2008 to look for a WIMP signal in the Sun. WIMPs are one of the most popular scenarios to explain the dark matter content of the Universe. They would accumulate in massive objects like the Sun or the Galactic Center and their self-annihilation would produce (directly or indirectly) high energy neutrinos detectable by neutrin…
Analysis of the 4-year IceCube high-energy starting events
2016
After four years of data taking, the IceCube neutrino telescope has detected 54 high-energy starting events (HESE, or contained-vertex events) with deposited energies above 20TeV. They represent the first ever detection of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos and therefore, the first step in neutrino astronomy. In order to study the energy, flavor and isotropy of the astrophysical neutrino flux arriving at Earth, we perform different analyses of two different deposited energy intervals, [10 TeV $-$ 10 PeV] and [60 TeV $-$ 10 PeV]. We first consider an isotropic unbroken power-law spectrum and constrain its shape, normalization and flavor composition. Our results are in agreement with the …
IceCube-Gen2: The Window to the Extreme Universe
2020
The observation of electromagnetic radiation from radio to $\gamma$-ray wavelengths has provided a wealth of information about the universe. However, at PeV (10$^{15}$ eV) energies and above, most of the universe is impenetrable to photons. New messengers, namely cosmic neutrinos, are needed to explore the most extreme environments of the universe where black holes, neutron stars, and stellar explosions transform gravitational energy into non-thermal cosmic rays. The discovery of cosmic neutrinos with IceCube has opened this new window on the universe. In this white paper, we present an overview of a next-generation instrument, IceCube-Gen2, which will sharpen our understanding of the proce…
Summary of Working Group 4: High Energy Neutrino Telescopes
2007
The field of high-energy neutrino astronomy is rapidly developing. A number of new experiments are currently being deployed and developed. Additionally, the recent successes of TeV gamma-ray astronomy have exciting implications for future neutrino telescopes. Here we will summarize these and other issues as they were discussed in the TeV II workshop's neutrino astronomy working group.
Hunt for θ13with LENA
2012
In a hunt for by far missing neutrino mixing angle ?13 the accelerator experiments have recently indicated non-zero value and the dedicated reactor neutrino experiments are moving towards the data-taking phase to confirm that. The small effect of ?13 to the neutrino oscillation probabilities can be also complementarily probed using artificially made source of mono-chromatic neutrinos with low energies originated from electron capture processes. Due to the small energy of neutrino and tiny interaction cross section, and the expected scale of ?13 support the use of large liquid scintillation detector. In this work, the estimated sensitivities for measurement of mixing angle ?13 is presented i…
Another way of looking at the sky: Neutrino telescopes
2016
Neutrinos are weakly-interacting neutral particles, which makes them powerful sources of information about the most energetic processes in the universe, such as the origin of ultra-energetic cosmic rays or gamma-ray bursts. However, a price must be paid in order to detect them: gargantuan detectors at the bottom of the sea or under the Antarctic ice are required. The detection of the first high-energy cosmic neutrinos in 2013 by the IceCube observatory represented the start of so-called neutrino astronomy, a new way of observing the universe, which can play a key role in future discoveries. In this article, we describe how neutrino telescopes work, as well as the different initial configura…