Speaker
Claudio Kopper
(University of Alberta)
Description
The spectrum of cosmic rays includes the most energetic particles ever observed. The mechanism of their acceleration and their sources are, however, still mostly unknown. Observing astrophysical neutrinos can help solve this problem. Because neutrinos are produced in hadronic interactions and are neither absorbed nor deflected, they point directly back to their source. Neutrinos may also be produced in other astrophysical processes, such as WIMP annihilation, and the detection of such particles will allow insight into these processes. This talk will cover searches for high-energy neutrinos (> 10 TeV) at the IceCube South Pole neutrino observatory, which have lead to the discovery of a flux beyond standard expectations from neutrinos generated in the Earth's atmosphere. This includes the detection of events with energies above 1 PeV -- the highest energy neutrinos ever observed. In addition to astrophysical neutrino searches, IceCube’s lower energy threshold of about 10 GeV makes the detector a multi-purpose instrument, allowing us to study effects such as neutrino oscillation using atmospheric neutrinos. The talk will give an overview of the IceCube physics programme and will present recent results. In addition future detector extensions will be discussed.
Primary author
Claudio Kopper
(University of Alberta)
