Search for Astrophysical Sources of Neutrinos Using Cascade Events in IceCube
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Aartsen_2017_ApJ_846_136.pdf
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Author(s)
IceCube Collaboration
Arguelles Delgado, Carlos A
Axani, Spencer Nicholas
Collin, G. H.
Conrad, Janet Marie
Moulai, Marjon H.
Date Issued
September 2017
Journal
Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Aartsen, M. G. et al. “Search for Astrophysical Sources of Neutrinos Using Cascade Events in IceCube.” The Astrophysical Journal 846, 2 (September 2017): 136 © 2017 The American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The IceCube neutrino observatory has established the existence of a flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, which is inconsistent with the expectation from atmospheric backgrounds at a significance greater than 5σ. This flux has been observed in analyses of both track events from muon neutrino interactions and cascade events from interactions of all neutrino flavors. Searches for astrophysical neutrino sources have focused on track events due to the significantly better angular resolution of track reconstructions. To date, no such sources have been confirmed. Here we present the first search for astrophysical neutrino sources using cascades interacting in IceCube with deposited energies as small as 1 TeV. No significant clustering was observed in a selection of 263 cascades collected from 2010 May to 2012 May. We show that compared to the classic approach using tracks, this statistically independent search offers improved sensitivity to sources in the southern sky, especially if the emission is spatially extended or follows a soft energy spectrum. This enhancement is due to the low background from atmospheric neutrinos forming cascade events and the additional veto of atmospheric neutrinos at declinations ≲-30.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/AA8508
