Search for muon-neutrino emission from GeV and TeV gamma-ray flaring blazars using five years of data of the ANTARES telescope

The ANTARES telescope is well-suited for detecting astrophysical transient neutrino sources as it can observe a full hemisphere of the sky at all times with a high duty cycle. The background due to atmospheric particles can be drastically reduced, and the point-source sensitivity improved, by selecting a narrow time window around possible neutrino production periods. Blazars, being radio-loud active galactic nuclei with their jets pointing almost directly towards the observer, are particularly attractive potential neutrino point sources, since they are among the most likely sources of the very high-energy cosmic rays. Neutrinos and gamma rays may be produced in hadronic interactions with the surrounding medium. Moreover, blazars generally show high time variability in their light curves at different wavelengths and on various time scales. This paper presents a time-dependent analysis applied to a selection of flaring gamma-ray blazars observed by the FERMI/LAT experiment and by TeV Cherenkov telescopes using five years of ANTARES data taken from 2008 to 2012. The results are compatible with fluctuations of the background. Upper limits on the neutrino fluence have been produced and compared to the measured gamma-ray spectral energy distribution.Comment: 27 pages, 16 figure

The Antares Collaboration : Contributions to the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2015, The Hague)

The ANTARES detector, completed in 2008, is the largest neutrino telescope in the Northern hemisphere. Located at a depth of 2.5 km in the Mediterranean Sea, 40 km off the Toulon shore, its main goal is the search for astrophysical high energy neutrinos. In this paper we collect the 21 contributions of the ANTARES collaboration to the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2015). The scientific output is very rich and the contributions included in these proceedings cover the main physics results, ranging from steady point sources, diffuse searches, multi-messenger analyses to exotic physics

Searches for Point-like and extended neutrino sources close to the Galactic Centre using the ANTARES neutrino Telescope

A search for cosmic neutrino sources using six years of data collected by the ANTARES neutrino telescope has been performed. Clusters of muon neutrinos over the expected atmospheric background have been looked for. No clear signal has been found. The most signal-like accumulation of events is located at equatorial coordinates R.A. = -46 degrees.8 and decl. = -64 degrees.9 and corresponds to a 2.2 sigma background fluctuation. In addition, upper limits on the flux normalization of an E-2 muon neutrino energy spectrum have been set for 50 pre-selected astrophysical objects. Finally, motivated by an accumulation of seven events relatively close to the Galactic Center in the recently reported neutrino sample of the IceCube telescope, a search for point sources in a broad region around this accumulation has been carried out. No indication of a neutrino signal has been found in the ANTARES data and upper limits on the flux normalization of an E-2 energy spectrum of neutrinos from point sources in that region have been set. The 90% confidence level upper limits on the muon neutrino flux normalization vary between 3.5 and 5.1 x 10(-8) GeV cm(-2) s(-1), depending on the exact location of the source

Searches for clustering in the time integrated skymap of the ANTARES neutrino telescope

This paper reports a search for spatial clustering of the arrival directions of high energy muon neutrinos detected by the ANTARES neutrino telescope. An improved two-point correlation method is used to study the autocorrelation of 3058 neutrino candidate events as well as cross-correlations with other classes of astrophysical objects: sources of high energy gamma rays, massive black holes and nearby galaxies. No significant deviations from the isotropic distribution of arrival directions expected from atmospheric backgrounds are observed

A search for time dependent neutrino emission from microquasars with the ANTARES telescope

Results are presented on a search for neutrino emission from a sample of six microquasars, based on the data collected by the ANTARES neutrino telescope between 2007 and 2010. By means of appropriate time cuts, the neutrino search has been restricted to the periods when the acceleration of relativistic jets was taking place at the microquasars under study. The time cuts have been chosen using the information from the X-ray telescopes RXTE/ASM and Swift/BAT, and, in one case, the gamma-ray telescope Fermi/LAT. No statistically significant excess has been observed, thus upper limits on the neutrino fluences have been derived and compared to the predictions by models. Constraints have been put on the ratio of proton to electron luminosity in the jets

Constraining the neutrino emission of gravitationally lensed Flat-Spectrum Radio Quasars with ANTARES data

This paper proposes to exploit gravitational lensing effects to improve the sensitivity of neutrino telescopes to the intrinsic neutrino emission of distant blazar populations. This strategy is illustrated with a search for cosmic neutrinos in the direction of four distant and gravitationally lensed Flat-Spectrum Radio Quasars. The magnification factor is estimated for each system assuming a singular isothermal profile for the lens. Based on data collected from 2007 to 2012 by the ANTARES neutrino telescope, the strongest constraint is obtained from the lensed quasar B0218+357, providing a limit on the total neutrino luminosity of this source of 1.08 x 10(46) erg s(-1) This limit is about one order of magnitude lower than those previously obtained in the ANTARES standard point source searches with non-lensed Flat-Spectrum Radio Quasars

Search of Dark Matter Annihilation in the Galactic Centre using the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope

A search for high-energy neutrinos coming from the direction of the GalacticCentre is performed using the data recorded by the ANTARES neutrino telescopefrom 2007 to 2012. The event selection criteria are chosen to maximise thesensitivity to possible signals produced by the self-annihilation of weaklyinteracting massive particles accumulated around the centre of the Milky Waywith respect to the atmospheric background. After data unblinding, the numberof neutrinos observed in the line of sight of the Galactic Centre is found tobe compatible with background expectations. The 90% C.L. upper limits in termsof the neutrino+anti-neutrino flux, $\rm \Phi_{\nu_{\mu}+\bar{\nu}_\mu}$, andthe velocity averaged annihilation cross-section, $\rm$, arederived for the WIMP self-annihilation channels into \rmb\bar{b},W^{+}W^{-},\tau^{+}\tau^{-},\mu^{+}\mu^{-},\nu\bar{\nu}. The ANTARESlimits for $\rm$ are shown to be the most stringent for aneutrino telescope over the WIMP masses $\rm 25\,GeV < M_{WIMP} < 10\,TeV$

Search for muon-neutrino emission from GeV and TeV gamma-ray flaring blazars using five years of data of the ANTARES telescope

The ANTARES telescope is well-suited for detecting astrophysical transient neutrino sources as it can observe a full hemisphere of the sky at all times with a high duty cycle. The background due to atmospheric particles can be drastically reduced, and the point-source sensitivity improved, by selecting a narrow time window around possible neutrino production periods. Blazars, being radio-loud active galactic nuclei with their jets pointing almost directly towards the observer, are particularly attractive potential neutrino point sources, since they are among the most likely sources of the very high-energy cosmic rays. Neutrinos and gamma rays may be produced in hadronic interactions with the surrounding medium. Moreover, blazars generally show high time variability in their light curves at different wavelengths and on various time scales. This paper presents a time-dependent analysis applied to a selection of flaring gamma-ray blazars observed by the FERMI/LAT experiment and by TeV Cherenkov telescopes using five years of ANTARES data taken from 2008 to 2012. The results are compatible with fluctuations of the background. Upper limits on the neutrino fluence have been produced and compared to the measured gamma-ray spectral energy distributionThe authors acknowledge the financial support of the funding agencies: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Commissariat a l'energie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA), Commission Europeenne (FEDER fund and Marie Curie Program), Region Ile-de-France (DIM-ACAV) Region Alsace (contrat CPER), Region Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, Departement du Var and Ville de La Seyne-sur-Mer, France; Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy; Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie (FOM), Nederlandse organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), the Netherlands; Council of the President of the Russian Federation for young scientists and leading scientific schools supporting grants, Russia; National Authority for Scientific Research (ANCS), Romania; Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO), Prometeo and Grisolia programs of Generalitat Valenciana and MultiDark, Spain; Agence de l'Oriental and CNRST, Morocco. 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