Mainz 2014 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 48: Eingeladene Vorträge 2

T 48.2: Prize Talk

Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 14:15–14:45, P1

The diffuse muon neutrino sky with IceCube — •Anne Schukraft for the IceCube collaboration — III. Physikalisches Institut, RWTH Aachen University, D-52056 Aachen, Germany — Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510, USA — Trägerin des Hertha-Sponer-Preises

The neutrino telescope IceCube at the geographic South Pole has been built with the main goal to discover high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Evidence for such a signal has recently been found consistently in several detection channels. This observation opens the window to a new era in neutrino astronomy. However, this signal still remains diffuse, which means that the signal appears as a high-energy excess over the background of atmospheric neutrinos and individual cosmic sources have not yet been identified. Particularly muon neutrinos are promising for the goal to identify the sources. While muon neutrinos provide a good directional resolution, the muon neutrino channel also allocates large statistics of atmospheric neutrino background events. It therefore provides the opportunity to constrain this background by the experimental data. This is an essential contribution to the background estimation of astrophysical neutrino searches in other channels, in particular with respect to the largely unknown prompt atmospheric neutrino component, which arises from the production and decay of heavy quarks in the atmosphere. This talk explains the analysis strategy of searches for a diffuse flux of cosmic muon neutrinos in the context of the recent IceCube observations.