Joint searches between gravitational-wave interferometers and high-energy neutrino telescopes: science reach and analysis strategies

Many of the astrophysical sources and violent phenomena observed in our Universe are potential emitters of gravitational waves (GWs) and high-energy neutrinos (HENs). A network of GW detectors such as LIGO and Virgo can determine the direction/time of GW bursts while the IceCube and ANTARES neutrino telescopes can also provide accurate directional information for HEN events. Requiring the consistency between both, totally independent, detection channels shall enable new searches for cosmic events arriving from potential common sources, of which many extra-galactic objects.Comment: 4 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the 2d Heidelberg Workshop: "High-Energy Gamma-rays and Neutrinos from Extra-Galactic Sources", Heidelberg (Germany), January 13-16, 200

CeLAND: search for a 4th light neutrino state with a 3 PBq 144Ce-144Pr electron antineutrino generator in KamLAND

The reactor neutrino and gallium anomalies can be tested with a 3-4 PBq (75-100 kCi scale) 144Ce-144Pr antineutrino beta-source deployed at the center or next to a large low-background liquid scintillator detector. The antineutrino generator will be produced by the Russian reprocessing plant PA Mayak as early as 2014, transported to Japan, and deployed in the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector (KamLAND) as early as 2015. KamLAND's 13 m diameter target volume provides a suitable environment to measure the energy and position dependence of the detected neutrino flux. A characteristic oscillation pattern would be visible for a baseline of about 10 m or less, providing a very clean signal of neutrino disappearance into a yet-unknown, sterile neutrino state. This will provide a comprehensive test of the electron dissaperance neutrino anomalies and could lead to the discovery of a 4th neutrino state for Delta_m^2 > 0.1 eV^2 and sin^2(2theta) > 0.05.Comment: 67 pages, 50 figures. Th. Lasserre thanks the European Research Council for support under the Starting Grant StG-30718

All-sky Search for High-Energy Neutrinos from Gravitational Wave Event GW170104 with the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope

Advanced LIGO detected a significant gravitational wave signal (GW170104) originating from the coalescence of two black holes during the second observation run on January 4$^{\textrm{th}}$, 2017. An all-sky high-energy neutrino follow-up search has been made using data from the ANTARES neutrino telescope, including both upgoing and downgoing events in two separate analyses. No neutrino candidates were found within $\pm500$ s around the GW event time nor any time clustering of events over an extended time window of $\pm3$ months. The non-detection is used to constrain isotropic-equivalent high-energy neutrino emission from GW170104 to less than $\sim4\times 10^{54}$ erg for a $E^{-2}$ spectrum

Multimessenger astronomy with gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos

Revised version, to appear in Reviews of Modern Physics (Colloquium Series). Section II on Potential GW+HEN emitters thoroughly updated. Section IV expanded with recent experimental results from joint GW+HEN searches with ANTARES, IceCube, LIGO and VIRGO, and with an extended discussion of the reach and implications of future searches.Many of the astrophysical sources and violent phenomena observed in our Universe are potential emitters of gravitational waves (GW) and high-energy neutrinos (HEN). Both GWs and HENs may escape very dense media and travel unaffected over cosmological distances, carrying information from the innermost regions of the astrophysical engines. Such messengers could also reveal new, hidden sources that have not been observed by conventional photon-based astronomy. Coincident observation of GWs and HENs may thus play a critical role in multimessenger astronomy. This is particularly true at the present time owing to the advent of a new generation of dedicated detectors: IceCube, ANTARES, VIRGO and LIGO. Given the complexity of the instruments, a successful joint analysis of this data set will be possible only if the expertise and knowledge of the data is shared between the two communities. This review aims at providing an overview of both theoretical and experimental state-of-the-art and perspectives for such a GW+HEN multimessenger astronomy

The ANTARES Collaboration: Contributions to ICRC 2017 Part I: Neutrino astronomy (diffuse fluxes and point sources)

Papers on neutrino astronomy (diffuse fluxes and point sources, prepared for the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017, Busan, South Korea) by the ANTARES Collaboratio

The ANTARES Collaboration: Contributions to ICRC 2017 Part III: Searches for dark matter and exotics, neutrino oscillations and detector calibration

Papers on the searches for dark matter and exotics, neutrino oscillations and detector calibration, prepared for the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017, Busan, South Korea) by the ANTARES Collaboratio

The ANTARES Collaboration: Contributions to ICRC 2017 Part II: The multi-messenger program

Papers on the ANTARES multi-messenger program, prepared for the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017, Busan, South Korea) by the ANTARES Collaboratio

Background Light in Potential Sites for the ANTARES Undersea Neutrino Telescope

The ANTARES collaboration has performed a series of {\em in situ} measurements to study the background light for a planned undersea neutrino telescope. Such background can be caused by $^{40}$K decays or by biological activity. We report on measurements at two sites in the Mediterranean Sea at depths of 2400~m and 2700~m, respectively. Three photomultiplier tubes were used to measure single counting rates and coincidence rates for pairs of tubes at various distances. The background rate is seen to consist of three components: a constant rate due to $^{40}$K decays, a continuum rate that varies on a time scale of several hours simultaneously over distances up to at least 40~m, and random bursts a few seconds long that are only correlated in time over distances of the order of a meter. A trigger requiring coincidences between nearby photomultiplier tubes should reduce the trigger rate for a neutrino telescope to a manageable level with only a small loss in efficiency.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic