IceCube’s 14-year data release for neutrino source searches

Posted on by Alisa King-Klemperer

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, searches for weakly interacting particles called neutrinos that are able to travel undisturbed through the cosmos. Of interest are high-energy astrophysical neutrinos that can arise from cosmic-ray interactions with matter or photons in astrophysical sources.

In the emerging field of multimessenger astronomy, measurements across the electromagnetic spectrum are combined and used to probe the nature of astrophysical phenomena. With the emergence of next-generation neutrino telescopes, there is a growing need for publicly available datasets to aid multimessenger astronomy studies.

The IceCube Collaboration presents an updated public data release, IceTracks-DR2, that covers 14 years of neutrino track-like event observations, extending the previously published dataset by four years. IceTracks-DR2 represents a sample of IceCube neutrino source search data that has been made publicly available to date. The data release, along with results from a benchmark study, are in a paper recently submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Supplements.

The neutrino sky map for events contained in this data release, showing the most significant points of clustering in the north and south. Credit: IceCube Collaboration
The neutrino sky map for events contained in this data release, showing the most significant points of clustering in the north and south. Credit: IceCube Collaboration

In addition to four more years of IceCube data, the new release contains improvements in detector calibration and event processing as well as documentation of generic neutrino point source results using both internal and public tools. The collaborators also listened to community feedback on the 2021 data release and made improvements to the instrument response function matrix, a representation of how IceCube responds to various types of neutrino events. 

A headshot of a woman with a blue shirt wearing glasses.
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From left to right: Chiara Bellenghi, Jose Carpio, and Tomas Kontrimas, William Luszczak, and Riya Shah.

The study was led by Chiara Bellenghi, a postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universität München (TUM); Jose Carpio, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Tomas Kontrimas, a PhD graduate from TUM; William Luszczak, a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University; and Riya Shah, a PhD graduate from Drexel University. 

“The previous version of this data release saw use in numerous multimessenger studies of astrophysical objects and was downloaded over 30,000 times over the past three years,” says Luszczak. “Given the clear interest in this type of data from the scientific community at large, publicly releasing this data serves as a way to foster innovation and progress throughout the scientific community.”

+ info “IceCube Second Track Data Release IceTracks-DR2: Data from 2008-2022 for Neutrino Source Searches,” IceCube Collaboration: R. Abbasi et al. arxiv.org/abs/2605.19040v1