8,342 research outputs found
Atmospheric and Astrophysical Neutrinos above 1 TeV Interacting in IceCube
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was designed primarily to search for
high-energy (TeV--PeV) neutrinos produced in distant astrophysical objects. A
search for ~TeV neutrinos interacting inside the instrumented
volume has recently provided evidence for an isotropic flux of such neutrinos.
At lower energies, IceCube collects large numbers of neutrinos from the weak
decays of mesons in cosmic-ray air showers. Here we present the results of a
search for neutrino interactions inside IceCube's instrumented volume between
1~TeV and 1~PeV in 641 days of data taken from 2010--2012, lowering the energy
threshold for neutrinos from the southern sky below 10 TeV for the first time,
far below the threshold of the previous high-energy analysis. Astrophysical
neutrinos remain the dominant component in the southern sky down to 10 TeV.
From these data we derive new constraints on the diffuse astrophysical neutrino
spectrum, , as well as the strongest upper limit yet on
the flux of neutrinos from charmed-meson decay in the atmosphere, 1.52 times
the benchmark theoretical prediction used in previous IceCube results at 90\%
confidence.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure
Flux of Atmospheric Neutrinos
Atmospheric neutrinos produced by cosmic-ray interactions in the atmosphere
are of interest for several reasons. As a beam for studies of neutrino
oscillations they cover a range of parameter space hitherto unexplored by
accelerator neutrino beams. The atmospheric neutrinos also constitute an
important background and calibration beam for neutrino astronomy and for the
search for proton decay and other rare processes. Here we review the literature
on calculations of atmospheric neutrinos over the full range of energy, but
with particular attention to the aspects important for neutrino oscillations.
Our goal is to assess how well the properties of atmospheric neutrinos are
known at present.Comment: 68 pages, 26 figures. With permission from the Annual Review of
Nuclear & Particle Science. Final version of this material is scheduled to
appear in the Annual Review of Nuclear & Particle Science Vol. 52, to be
published in December 2002 by Annual Reviews (http://annualreviews.org
Strange Exotic States and Compact Stars
We discuss the possible appearance of strange exotic multi-quark states in
the interior of neutron stars and signals for the existence of strange quark
matter in the core of compact stars. We show how the in-medium properties of
possible pentaquark states are constrained by pulsar mass measurements. The
possibility of generating the observed large pulsar kick velocities by
asymmetric emission of neutrinos from strange quark matter in magnetic fields
is outlined.Comment: 10 pages, invited talk given at the International Conference on
Strangeness in Quark Matter 2006 (SQM2006), UCLA, USA, March 26-31, 2006,
Journal of Physics G in press, refs. adde
The prompt lepton cookbook
We review the calculation of the prompt lepton flux, produced in the
atmosphere by the semileptonic decay of charmed particles. We describe side by
side the intermediary ingredients used by different authors, which include not
only the charm production model, but also other atmospheric particle showering
parameters. After evaluating separately the relevance of each single
ingredient, we analyze the effect of different combinations over the final
result. We highlight the impact of the prompt lepton flux calculation upon
high-energy neutrino telescopes.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures; revised version, accepted for publication in
Astroparticle Physic
Detection of Atmospheric Muon Neutrinos with the IceCube 9-String Detector
The IceCube neutrino detector is a cubic kilometer TeV to PeV neutrino
detector under construction at the geographic South Pole. The dominant
population of neutrinos detected in IceCube is due to meson decay in cosmic-ray
air showers. These atmospheric neutrinos are relatively well-understood and
serve as a calibration and verification tool for the new detector. In 2006, the
detector was approximately 10% completed, and we report on data acquired from
the detector in this configuration. We observe an atmospheric neutrino signal
consistent with expectations, demonstrating that the IceCube detector is
capable of identifying neutrino events. In the first 137.4 days of livetime,
234 neutrino candidates were selected with an expectation of 211 +/-
76.1(syst.) +/- 14.5(stat.) events from atmospheric neutrinos
Perspectives of High Energy Neutrino Astronomy
This work discusses the perspectives to observe fluxes of high energy
astrophysical neutrinos with the planned km3 telescopes. On the basis of the
observations of GeV and TeV gamma-rays, and of ultra high energy cosmic rays,
it is possible to construct well motivated predictions that indicate that the
discovery of such fluxes is probable. However the range of these predictions is
broad, and the very important opening of the ``neutrino window'' on the high
energy universe is not guaranteed with the current design of the detectors. The
problem of enlarging the detector acceptance using the same (water/ice
Cherenkov) or alternative (acoustic/radio) techniques is therefore of central
importance.Comment: Proceedings of "Very Large Volume neutrino Telescopes" workshop
(Catania, november 2005). 16 pages, 10 figure
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