Speaker
Description
Gamma-ray emission from the plane of the Milky Way is understood as partly originating from the interaction of cosmic rays with the interstellar medium. The same interaction is expected to produce a corresponding flux of neutrinos. In 2023, IceCube reported the first observation of this galactic neutrino flux, rejecting the null-hypothesis at 4.5σ. The analysis relied on spatial models – based on gamma ray observations – to model the expected neutrino emission from the galactic plane. Three signal hypotheses describing different possible spatial and energy distributions were tested, where the single free parameter in each test was the normalization of the neutrino flux.
We present an analysis that can improve the characterization of Galactic neutrino emission by dividing the galactic plane into segments in galactic longitude. An unbinned maximum-likelihood analysis is used that can fit the spectral index and the flux normalization separately in each segment. This work uses a full-sky cascade dataset and provides model-independent insight into the variation of the neutrino flux and energy distribution from different regions of the galactic plane.
| Collaboration(s) | IceCube |
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