SEARCH FOR SOURCES OF HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRONS WITH FOUR YEARS OF DATA FROM THE ICETOP DETECTOR
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Aartsen-2016-SEARCH for SOURCES of HIGH-ENERGY.pdf
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Author(s)
Arguelles Delgado, Carlos A
Axani, Spencer Nicholas
Conrad, Janet Marie
Jones, Benjamin James Poyner
Moulai, Marjon H.
Date Issued
October 2016
Journal
Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Aartsen, M. G., K. Abraham, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. A. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, M. Ahrens, et al. “SEARCH FOR SOURCES OF HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRONS WITH FOUR YEARS OF DATA FROM THE ICETOP DETECTOR.” The Astrophysical Journal 830, no. 2 (October 18, 2016): 129. © 2016 The American Astronomical Society.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
IceTop is an air-shower array located on the Antarctic ice sheet at the geographic South Pole. IceTop can detect an astrophysical flux of neutrons from Galactic sources as an excess of cosmic-ray air showers arriving from the source direction. Neutrons are undeflected by the Galactic magnetic field and can typically travel 10 (E/PeV) pc before decay. Two searches are performed using 4 yr of the IceTop data set to look for a statistically significant excess of events with energies above 10 PeV (1016 eV) arriving within a small solid angle. The all-sky search method covers from −90° to approximately −50° in declination. No significant excess is found. A targeted search is also performed, looking for significant correlation with candidate sources in different target sets. This search uses a higher-energy cut (100 PeV) since most target objects lie beyond 1 kpc. The target sets include pulsars with confirmed TeV energy photon fluxes and high-mass X-ray binaries. No significant correlation is found for any target set. Flux upper limits are determined for both searches, which can constrain Galactic neutron sources and production scenarios.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/830/2/129
