Search for Extremely High Energy Neutrinos with IceCube

Extremely high energy (EHE) neutrinos (with energies above $10^7$ GeV) are produced in interactions of the highest energy cosmic rays. A primary contribution to the EHE neutrino flux is expected from so-called cosmogenic neutrinos produced when ultra high energy cosmic rays interact with ambient photon backgrounds. Observations of these EHE neutrinos with IceCube can probe the nature of cosmic rays beyond the energies for resonant photo-pion production (GZK cutoff). We present a new event selection of extremely high energy neutrinos by more effectively identifying and rejecting high multiplicity muon bundles with respect to previous analyses. Furthermore, we show the expected improvements of the quasi-differential upper limits on the EHE neutrino flux using 12 years of IceCube data.Comment: Presented at the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023). See arXiv:2307.13047 for all IceCube contribution

"Does Vinegar Kill Coronavirus?" - Using Search Log Analysis to Estimate the Extent of COVID-19-Related Misinformation Searching Behaviour in the United States

Health experts and government authorities' actions to combat the coronavirus outbreak are strongly compromised by the misinformation infodemic that evolved in parallel to the COVID-19 pandemic. When people get misled by unscientific and unsubstantiated claims regarding the origin or cures for COVID-19, public health response efforts get undermined and people might be less likely to comply with official guidance and thus spread the virus or even harm themselves. To prevent this from happening, a first step is to reveal the prevalence of misinformation ideas in the public. In this study, we use search log analysis to investigate the extent and characteristics of misinformation seeking behaviour in the US using the Bing Search Data-set for Coronavirus Intent. We train a machine learning model to distinguish between regular and misinformation queries and find that only around 1\% of queries are related to misinformation myths or conspiracy theories. The query term \textit{qanon} --- connecting the conspiracy theory to many different origin myths of COVID-19 --- is the most frequent and steadily increasing misinformation-related query in the data-set