Search for high-energy neutrino emission from hard X-ray AGN with IceCube

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are powerful astronomical objects with very high luminosities. Theoretical arguments suggest that these objects are capable of accelerating particles to energies of 10$^{20}$ eV. In environments with matter or photon targets, cosmic-ray interactions transpire leading to the production of pionic gamma rays and neutrinos. Since the AGN environment is rich in gas, dust and photons, they are promising candidate sources of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. While the neutrinos manage to escape, the gamma rays may further interact and cascade down to hard X-rays in environments with sufficiently large photon or gas targets. We have used 12 years of IceCube data to perform a stacked search and a point source search for high-energy neutrino emission from hard X-ray AGN sampled from $\textit{Swift}$-BAT Spectroscopic Survey (BASS) and present the results of these two analyses.Comment: Presented at the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023). See arXiv:2307.13047 for all IceCube contribution

Non-standard neutrino interactions in IceCube

Non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) may arise in various types of new physics. Their existence would change the potential that atmospheric neutrinos encounter when traversing Earth matter and hence alter their oscillation behavior. This imprint on coherent neutrino forward scattering can be probed using high-statistics neutrino experiments such as IceCube and its low-energy extension, DeepCore. Both provide extensive data samples that include all neutrino flavors, with oscillation baselines between tens of kilometers and the diameter of the Earth. DeepCore event energies reach from a few GeV up to the order of 100 GeV - which marks the lower threshold for higher energy IceCube atmospheric samples, ranging up to 10 TeV. In DeepCore data, the large sample size and energy range allow us to consider not only flavor-violating and flavor-nonuniversal NSI in the μ−τ sector, but also those involving electron flavor. The effective parameterization used in our analyses is independent of the underlying model and the new physics mass scale. In this way, competitive limits on several NSI parameters have been set in the past. The 8 years of data available now result in significantly improved sensitivities. This improvement stems not only from the increase in statistics but also from substantial improvement in the treatment of systematic uncertainties, background rejection and event reconstruction

IceCube Search for Earth-traversing ultra-high energy Neutrinos

The search for ultra-high energy neutrinos is more than half a century old. While the hunt for these neutrinos has led to major leaps in neutrino physics, including the detection of astrophysical neutrinos, neutrinos at the EeV energy scale remain undetected. Proposed strategies for the future have mostly been focused on direct detection of the first neutrino interaction, or the decay shower of the resulting charged particle. Here we present an analysis that uses, for the first time, an indirect detection strategy for EeV neutrinos. We focus on tau neutrinos that have traversed Earth, and show that they reach the IceCube detector, unabsorbed, at energies greater than 100 TeV for most trajectories. This opens up the search for ultra-high energy neutrinos to the entire sky. We use ten years of IceCube data to perform an analysis that looks for secondary neutrinos in the northern sky, and highlight the promise such a strategy can have in the next generation of experiments when combined with direct detection techniques