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Astophysical Neutrino Source Searches Using IceCube Starting Tracks
Date: Tuesday, November 1st
Time: 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Place: 4274 Chamberlin or
Speaker: Sarah Mancina, Physics Graduate Student
Abstract: The IceCube detector is an array of optical light detectors embedded deep in the South Pole ice that aims to discover the origins of astrophysical neutrinos. Due to the detector's location, the southern equatorial sky astrophysical neutrino signal lies under a large background of muons generated in cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere. Therefore, IceCube’s sensitivity to astrophysical neutrino sources has always been stronger in the northern sky, where the main background is atmospheric neutrinos created by cosmic ray air showers.The research presented here focuses on improving IceCube’s sensitivity to southern sky sources by selecting for starting tracks, which are created by muon neutrinos that interact inside of the IceCube detector volume. By selecting for starting tracks, we not only reduce the atmospheric muon background but also the atmospheric neutrino background, allowing for a high purity sample of astrophysical neutrinos in the southern sky. The starting tracks were used to perform four types of searches for astrophysical neutrino sources: a whole sky neutrino source search, an individual source search with locations from bright gamma ray objects, a stacked source search which looks for a signal from multiple sources of the same type, and a galactic plane template search which looks for neutrinos created in the galactic plane medium. All searches were unable to significantly detect an astrophysical neutrino source, but the starting track selection technique could be used in tandem with other selections to discover galactic sources of neutrinos in the future.
Host: Albrecht Karle
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