Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 82: Neutrino Astronomy IV
T 82.4: Talk
Thursday, March 19, 2026, 17:00–17:15, KS H C
Atmospheric tau neutrino appearance analysis with 11 years of IceCube DeepCore data — •Sol Benkel for the IceCube collaboration — DESY Zeuthen
DeepCore, a region of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory with denser instrumentation, enables the detection of atmospheric neutrinos between 5 and 150 GeV, where a strong tau neutrino signal has been observed. DeepCore has continually provided high precision measurements of atmospheric neutrino oscillations, repeatedly setting world-leading results. In this talk, I present the design and current progress of a new analysis strategy for atmospheric tau neutrino appearance using 11 years of IceCube DeepCore data. This strategy explores new metrics by which high resolution neutrino events can be isolated from the analysis sample, thus potentially improving the sensitivity to measure muon to tau neutrino oscillations. Rather than applying cuts, which would discard low-purity data, these metrics will only bin the data, thus isolating high-quality events while preserving the statistical power of the full dataset. With this approach, we expect to increase sensitivity to the signatures of ντ appearance from νµ oscillation, as this binning strategy would provide enhanced discrimination against the background from other cascade events.
Keywords: IceCube; neutrino oscillations; tau neutrino appearance