Speaker
Description
Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has reported a deviation from the single power law in the extragalactic diffuse neutrino flux, primarily driven by the hardening of the low-energy flux below 30 TeV, but ultimately, causally uncertain. The spectrum above 1 PeV also remains uncertain; it could continue as a single power law, cut off, or exhibit other features. A neural network-based event selection of contained and uncontained cascade events from IceCube, in which uncontained events have interaction vertices at the edge or outside of the detector instrumentation volume, with a factor ~3 gain in effective area over a novel IceCube starting tracks and cascades event selection in the southern sky, is being utilized to potentially clarify uncertainties of the spectrum. Improved understanding of the Antarctic ice and rigorously updated modeling of the atmospheric neutrino background are incorporated into this contained and uncontained cascade event selection to probe features of the astrophysical neutrino spectrum across energies from 1 TeV up to 100 PeV.
