At the start of the summer, UW-River Falls student Nick Jensen and I set out to create a 1:1000 scale model of the IceCube detector using LEDs to represent DOMs. To do this, we needed a wide assortment of parts to construct the model from the ground up. We spent the first half of the summer trying to gather all the parts needed for building. […]
In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the “sterile neutrino.” Now, with the latest results from an icy particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle. […]
The IceCube Collaboration is now accumulating more statistics in the search for the sources of very high energy neutrinos, but also to learn more about their nature. In a new study, submitted this week to the Astrophysical Journal, the collaboration reports a substantially improved observation of the diffuse muon neutrino flux in the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data with about a tenfold increase in statistics. Once more, a clear astrophysical contribution has been found, which at the highest energies excludes a purely atmospheric origin at the 5.6 sigma level. Also, the accuracy of the measurement of the spectral properties has been improved.
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The IceCube Collaboration has made public today that a new search for cosmogenic neutrinos resulted in two very high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos, which are found to be of astrophysical origin with a 92.3% probability, include the highest energy neutrino detected to date. While of astrophysical origin, the energy of these neutrinos does not match the expectation for a cosmogenic neutrino flux. The lack of evidence for such events in a search of seven years of IceCube data places very strong constraints on the sources of UHECR. Proton-dominated sources are greatly disfavored, and testing mixed and heavy nuclei cosmic-ray sources will require much bigger instruments, such as an extension of IceCube or radio Askaryan neutrino detectors. These results have been submitted yesterday to Physical Review Letters. […]
The IceCube Collaboration presents results from a search for sources of high-energy neutrons using four years of data from IceTop, the surface detector array. Researchers have not found any evidence for astrophysical neutrons, but the results have allowed the collaboration to set new limits that constrain the possible galactic neutron sources. These results have just been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. […]
The Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU) is the proposed infill extension in a region at the center of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that will lower the energy threshold to a few GeV, dramatically increasing both the number of GeV-scale neutrinos detected by IceCube and, more importantly, the precision with which they are measured. […]
The IceCube Collaboration presents a new search for dark matter annihilation from the galactic center and halo using cascade events, i.e., particle showers created by the interaction of electron and tau neutrinos and Z-boson mediated muon neutrinos. Scientists searched for interactions starting in the DeepCore subarray between May 2011 and May 2012 and found no neutrino excess with respect to the background-only hypothesis, which allowed them to derive upper limits on dark matter candidates with masses between 30 GeV and 10 TeV. These results have been submitted today to the European Physical Journal C. […]
“On behalf of the operations group, I’m happy to report that as of run 127950 on 2016-05-20, 20:38:47 UTC, we have started the IC86-2016 physics run.” With these words, every IceCuber learned that we were entering a new year of data for IceCube. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has performed two independent searches for light sterile neutrinos, both with one year of data, searching for sterile neutrinos in the energy range between approximately 320 GeV and 20 TeV. IceCube has not found any anomalous disappearance of muon neutrinos and has placed new exclusion limits on the parameter space of the 3+1 model, a scenario with only one sterile neutrino. These results have been submitted today to Physical Review Letters. […]
Today, the IceCube Collaboration presents a new technique to lower the energy threshold for neutrino detection while keeping a pointing resolution to within less than a degree. IceCube researchers have used this technique in a joint search with data from a previous analysis using throughgoing muon neutrinos. No point source has been found, but sensitivity for searches below 100 TeV has been improved by a factor of ten. […]