The IceCube Collaboration has continued the hunt for sterile neutrinos with a search using lower energy atmospheric neutrinos. This new search looked into three years of IceCube data and again has not found any hint of a light sterile neutrino. These results have been submitted today to Physical Review D. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has recently presented an update to the search for dark matter annihilation in the sun using the first three years of data with the completed detector. The search, which again did not find evidence of neutrinos originating from dark matter annihilations, has now improved these limits by a factor of 2 to 4. These are again the most stringent limits on the spin-dependent dark-matter–proton scattering for WIMP masses above 50 GeV. This study was submitted to the European Physical Journal C. […]
New measurements of neutrino oscillations, observed at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, have shed light on outstanding questions regarding fundamental properties of neutrinos. These new measurements of neutrinos as they change from one type to another while they travel were presented at the American Physical Society Meeting in Washington. […]
For the first time, the IceCube Collaboration is making public every detail of the only cubic-kilometer neutrino detector to date, from a flasher board in the digital optical modules—aka DOMs—to the calibration processes that allow researchers to measure the properties of neutrinos, or to the IceCube Live website that IceCubers use to monitor what is going on in the detector. The publication, over 70 pages long, has just been submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation. […]
A new study from the IceCube Collaboration searched in three years of IceCube data for directional clustering of neutrinos around gamma-ray sources associated with blazars from the second Fermi-LAT AGN catalog. Although some enhancements in the observed neutrino rate from these blazars were found in the 3–30 TeV region, all of them are compatible with fluctuations of the atmospheric neutrino background. These results, recently submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, open several new analyses exploring blazars as very high energy neutrino sources. […]
IceCube’s collaborative efforts with gamma-ray, X-ray, and optical telescopes started long ago. Now, the IceCube, MAGIC and VERITAS collaborations present updates to their follow-up programs that will allow the gamma-ray community to collect data from specific sources during periods when IceCube detects a higher number of neutrinos. Details of the very high energy gamma-ray follow-up program have been submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has just announced the results of a search for point-like sources using track-like neutrino candidates detected by IceCube over seven years, from 2008 to 2015. No source has been identified, but the sensitivity keeps improving at a fast pace and will allow IceCube to test accurate models that suggest that sources could soon be observed. These results have just been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has expanded dark matter studies with a search for annihilations in the center of the Earth. Researchers have used one year of data—May 2011 to May 2012—and have not found an excess of neutrinos above the expected background. The results have set new limits on the annihilation rate of WIMPs in the Earth that are an order of magnitude stronger than previous results by AMANDA and that also improve the IceCube spin-independent cross section limits for a WIMP mass of 50 GeV. This study has just been submitted to The European Physical Journal C. […]
Growing up on a small, secluded hobby farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the night sky played a major role in my upbringing. Since there is almost no light pollution, the night sky was always bright and clear. In the summer months, my bedtime was determined by the time a specific satellite went over the house. Every year, my family would gather up all the blankets in the house and lay outside to watch meteor showers for hours. From a young age, I loved the idea of learning more about the stars and planets, and as I got into high school, I fell in love with physics. My original plan was to become a high school physics teacher, and I found the University of Wisconsin–River Falls (UWRF) not only has a fantastic physics program but is also involved with IceCube. I had heard about IceCube in 2013, when it won Physics World’s Breakthrough of the Year, and working for IceCube became my new goal and dream. […]
During my summer abroad, I worked with Dr. Jon Dumm, who is searching for an excess of neutrino events originating in the plane of the Milky Way. Dr. Dumm’s analysis is designed to look for a diffuse neutrino flux from the galactic plane in agreement with a map of where pion decay is expected to occur. However, this analysis is sensitive to a neutrino flux from point sources that are not necessarily distributed as the pion decay map predicts. We simulated four possible models of cosmic-ray source density in the galaxy as proxies for possible distributions of unresolved neutrino point sources. In doing so, we established limits on the total flux from various numbers of sources to which the primary pion-decay-based analysis is sensitive. […]