Aug 8 – 12, 2022
America/Toronto timezone

Measurement of the Astrophysical Diffuse Flux Spectrum using Muon Neutrino Events with a Contained Vertex in IceCube

Aug 10, 2022, 2:00 PM
20m
Parallel Talk Neutrinos Neutrinos

Speaker

Manuel Silva

Description

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic kilometer-sized detector designed to detect astrophysical neutrinos. However, cosmic rays interacting in the atmosphere produce a significant number of muons in the southern equatorial sky. This work outlines a new dataset with large background rejection and high signal efficiency using a boosted decision tree. This dataset is also effective at rejecting atmospheric neutrinos that are often accompanied with muons; this so-called self-veto effect allows us to reject atmospheric neutrinos in the southern sky significantly. We search for muon neutrinos that undergo a charged current interaction within the detector volume resulting in a neutrino energy resolution of ~25%. In addition, our selection techniques target muon neutrinos giving us a median angular resolution of 1 degree. The excellent signal purity and event properties of this dataset allow us to measure the astrophysical diffuse flux between 5 TeV and 1 PeV. We show this as a measurement of the astrophysical diffuse flux modeled as a single power law. We also show measurements of the flux assuming more complex models such as broken and piecewise power laws.

Collaboration name IceCube Collaboration

Co-authors

Sarah Mancina (University of Wisconsin -- Madison) ALBRECHT KARLE (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Presentation materials